The Pirates of Blood River 
                                             
Director: John Gilling
Year: 1962
Rating: 6.0
Recently, I have watched three Hammer films that involved pirates - this one, Captain Clegg and The Devil-Ship Pirates - and there was barely any time spent on ships. These were landlubber pirates. Perhaps Hammer didn't have the budget for a seafaring adventure. They give us fine pirates though - Peter Cushing in one and Christopher Lee in the other two. Clearly, pirate adventures even set on land were popular with the audiences at the time. Villains and heroes with very little gray between them. This one takes us from misguided romance to a cruel penal colony to an attack by pirates. It is a solid adventure but it doesn't really take off till the pirates go on a death march at the end.



To escape tyranny and have religious freedom many years before, a group of Huguenots settled on a small island and set up a colony. Over time, religious fanatics ruled over the colony with harsh punishments and laws. One being that adultery was a big no-no. So, when Jonathan (Kerwin Matthews) is caught in the arms of a man's wife, he is found guilty and sent to a penal colony. He escapes and is rescued by a band of pirates led by Captain LaRoche (Lee) with his eye-patch and French accent. Among his men are Oliver Reed and Michael Ripper (who was in all three pirate films; Reed only two of them).



The pirates kindly take him back to his island and then proceed to terrorize the colony. Because that is what pirates do. They want treasure. After they get it, they have to march back to the ship with it and some of the townsfolk decide to use guerilla war tactics to stop them. It gets quite good at that point. One reason I would never have become a pirate other than having to live with smelly men all the time is when they have differences with one another - in this case who gets to rape the pretty one - they have contests to the death. In Devil-Ship Pirates they take turns slugging each other and here they are blindfolded with a sword each and told to kill each other. Not the life for me.