Cast: Michael Caine, David Warner, Jeffrey Frank, Angela Punch McGregor, Frank Middlemass, Don Henderson, Dudley Sutton, Colin Jeavons, Zakes Mokae, Brad Sullivan, John O’Leary, Bruce McLaughlin, Jimmy Casino, Suzanne Astor, Rikki Rincon
Blair Maynard (Caine) is a journalist working on a story about mysterious boat disappearances in a remote area of the Bahamas. He decides to make a vacation of it and takes his son Justin (Frank) along on his trip to the Caribbean. Maynard’s investigation takes him to a small resort island where he makes the acquaintance of Dr. Wilson (Middlemass) and rents a sailboat. At sea on an idyllic fishing trip, Maynard’s boat is attacked, and after a brief fight he and Justin are taken prisoner by a band of strange-garbed men. Maynard finds himself and Justin at an uncharted island inhabited by a community of rough, gritty pirates, descendants of buccaneers that have lived undetected on the fringes of civilization for three hundred years. The pirate leader, John David Nau (Warner), works to make Justin into a member of the clan by a combination of compulsion, torture and beguiling pirate lore. Maynard is tried and convicted by a pirate court, but is kept alive so that he may conceive a child with Beth (Punch McGregor), one of the few young fertile women in the pirate band. Maynard tries to escape, but is recaptured. He needs a boat to leave the island, and access to the boats is controlled by the pirates. Reluctantly, Maynard enters into a relationship with Beth, who at first treats him as a dullard slave, but then begins to like him. Maynard watches in desperation as Nau makes inroads in brainwashing Justin. With Maynard along in chains, the buccaneers set out to sea and intercept a schooner carrying a group on a pleasure cruise. In a swift and deadly sequence, with skill honed by decades of practice, the pirates board the yacht and kill everyone on board. They return to the island with loot from the raid, and Maynard realizes Nau’s takeover of his son’s loyalty is almost complete. Justin is accepted as one of the clan. It turns out Dr. Wilson is acting in concert with the brigands, partly out of a twisted sense of historic preservation, and partly for a share of pirate loot. Maynard must find a way out of the island. Disowned by his son, he has two possible allies, Beth, and a boy from the clan with his own motives to want Maynard to take Justin away. The island locales provide lush and exotic surroundings to the film’s menace and danger. Based on the Peter Benchley novel of the same name.
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