Hammer films director Terence Fisher directed a few low budget films away from Hammer, Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, The Earth Dies Screaming and this film Island of the Burning Damned. None of these films can really compare with Fisher's best Hammer films although The Earth Dies Screaming isn't bad.
The film is about an extraterrestrial invasion of earth with the vanguard of space aliens landing on an island. The space aliens are unique in that they are to put it mildly warm blooded. They begin to heat the island up to temperatures of 100 degrees plus. Into this situation comes Christopher Lee as a scientist trying to stop them and Peter Cushing as a doctor on the Island.
For a science fiction film a lot of time is spent on some love triangle between an author, his secretary who parades around in a bikini and his wife who is the manger of the local pub. After a while one hopes they will get back to the actual problem at hand instead of having to watch them work out their personal problems during an alien invasion.
Terence Fisher was a good director of horror films but this low budget effort did not seem to bring out the best in his story telling despite the presence of old acting colleagues like Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.
Towards the end of the film they finally show the alien invaders but the cheapo production apparently didn't have the money to make them convincing alien monsters.
Anyway, the running time is 94 minutes, the writers were Pip and Jane Baker and Ronald Liles.
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