I honestly wouldn't go as far as to call "Welcome to Arrow Beach" a good film, not nearly in fact, but it's definitely an intriguing and bizarrely compelling mess! This film features the themes and plot aspects of a typically sick-spirited and coarse exploitation flick of the early 70s, but at the same time it has the cast and the musical guidance (Lou Rawls!) of a more sophisticated and ambitious melodrama. The supportive cast is already impressive, with names like Joanna Pettet and John Ireland, while the lead actor/director Laurence Harvey even briefly was a respectable A-listed actor who appeared in blockbusters like "The Manchurian Candidate" and "The Alamo". For some incomprehensible reason, Laurence Harvey decided – shortly before his untimely death due to stomach cancer – to direct himself depicting a dangerously disturbed Korean War veteran who lures gullible girls into the fancy beach house that he shares with his sister, but only with the intention to hack 'em up in the basement and EAT them! We slowly (
VERY slowly
), through incomplete and obscure flashbacks, learn that Harvey's character Jason Henry got forced to revert to cannibalism during the war in order to survive, which evidently left him severely traumatized and mentally unstable for life. The main problem with "Welcome to Arrow Beach", apart from the at times intolerably slow pacing, is that practically nothing happens and that the horror of it all almost exclusively relies on suggestion. We never see Jason Henry consume human flesh and there are only two short and rather vague sequences in which he waves around a meat cleaver and pulls the face of a genuine madman. The other 98% of the film's footage revolves around the naive but lush hippie girl Robbin Stanley (played by a young Meg Foster who only just recently had a glorious supportive role in Rob Zombie's "31") who consecutively survives a wicked hitch-hike with a crazed hot rod driver, narrowly escapes from Henry's slaughter basement, gets called a liar by the police and then flees with a hunky doctor's assistant. Then there's also the completely irrelevant and dull sub plot of the local Sheriff who runs a campaign in order to get re-elected
There are a few isolated moments of suspense, mainly accomplished by Harvey himself thanks to his intense performance, and the fairly brutish massacre of a depressed middle-aged prostitute is the film's dubious highlight.
