Twistin 21st Dec 2020
| | Rated 8/10Virtually unheard of, Welcome to Arrow Beach is an entertaining thriller, and the last film from Laurence Harvey, who also directs. It hardly compares to his previous masterpiece, The Manchurian Candidate, but never mind that.
The story begins with a very cute hitch-hiking hippy chick (Meg Foster) who ends up in the quiet title beach community. After a nude swim in the beach, she meets and becomes friends with Jason (Harvey), who happens to have been watching her through his scope. He has a dark past from his days in the Korean war which has managed to integrate into his world back home where he lives with his sister, who just happens to be his lover. Their beach-front home is a good location for spotting pretty young runaways or drifters, which is our setup.
Harvey helmed this thriller while deathly ill and some parts certainly suffer from whatever he was going through dealing with stomach cancer while directing and starring in a cannibal opera. Good supporting cast and an unusual title song by Lou Rawls that draws creepy parallels to the story, despite the initial impression of being awkward and unfitting.
In a perfect world, Warner Bros. would restore the full version of the film and release it on home video, but that's not likely to happen any time soon, if ever. Major studios had never dealt with an extreme topic like cannibalism in 1974, so this only played in a few test-market cities -- sometimes with alternate names -- ultimately getting shelved due to either drab boxoffice figures or embarrassment. I was lucky enough to see a brand new, uncut 35mm print (in a big, oldschool N.C. movie theater) and enjoyed it a lot. But that was based on the fact that I didn't measure the film by how gory it was or wasn't, so if that is your criteria, you may love or hate the film, depending on your disposition. Even with some plot holes and abandoned side stories, it worked for me. Meg Foster certainly played a part in the film's appeal with her haunting, innocent beauty.
It's rare enough to find any version of this film, but if you do, it will likely be an edited copy. Some prints have chopped out the cannibal element entirely, leaving behind a jumbled mess. I own two different versions and neither is technically complete. Maybe we'll get lucky and Criterion, or one of several Blu-ray labels who specialize in limited editions will take on this project.
For the time being, if you find the DVD from Luminous Video, that's the edited 85 minute version, despite its claim of being uncut. The (assumed) uncut version can only be had from an old VHS tape from Magnetic Video (who later became CBS/Fox), but even that version is full screen (1.33:1) and is fairly washed out, coming from the infancy of the home video market.
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