Critics reviews

I haven't watched any of Rothman's six other features, which boast titles like It's a Bikini World (1967) and The Velvet Vampire (1971), and it's easy to look at those names and sniff derisively. Based on Terminal Island, however, Rothman appears to have more artistic chops than her particular genre trappings might suggest. The film initially plays like a riff on Peter Watkins' faux-doc cri de coeur Punishment Park (1971)... From there, the movie gets more endearingly goofy than outraged.

Terminal Island is a left-ish fata morgana by a femme with no time to lose. If James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese, and several other, male protégés of Roger Corman made B movies as practice for A movies, Rothman made B movies as a way to make movies, period, but also as blueprints for a world in which, someday, Kathryn Bigelow would beat Cameron for the Oscar. Any film made by a woman in the early '70s was a revenge film... Rothman's movies dared to be post-revenge.

The first act is strong, with a penal colony - murderers left to fend for themselves on a desert island - resolving naturally (and plausibly) into a savage community where the strong oppress the weak and (the few) women are kept captive for the gratification of men (note the presence of a female director), but then our heroines escape to a nicer community where sexual harassment is frowned-upon - one of them takes a comical revenge on a macho pig - and it's just goodies vs. baddies...