It all starts groovily enough, with rockin' '70s TV cop drama theme music! Wow, if it the killer doesn't turn out to be one of the guys from "CHiPS" I think I'm gonna be very disappointed now. The very barebones story is simple to follow: a group of friends head to an out-of-the-way island for a relaxing vacation with friends. One of the ladies happens to be a tarot card reader, and when her friend asks to have her future read, it seems that the cards reveal there is no future for them... Afterwards, Carol the soothsayer goes a little crazy and tosses her cards overboard, no doubt a premonition of dooms to come. And sure enough, as soon as the crew hits land, the group's pregnant member Maggie... SPRAINS HER ANKLE! DAMN YOU D'AMATO YOU TWISTED FREAK! WHAT HORRORS HAVE YOU WROUGHT UPON YOUR UNSUSPECTING CAST NOW?!

Our septet of corpi-to-be find the small island town deserted for no apparent reason with the sole means of communication to the mainland, a telegraph machine, intentionally destroyed and the last record of a message being sent over a month before... Feeling that impending doom yet? Yeah, you probably thought it was just your sciatica acting up again, but it's not. It's doom. No sooner does our cast finally find inhabitants (one elusive woman who may or may not be a ghost and who doesn't want to talk to our guests beyond the occasional “GO AWAY” written on a window) then the killings get underway. It’s post time ladies and gents, so place your bets, place your bets, place your bets! Who's gonna live, who's gonna die, and just how far will Ol' Grandpa Joe go to gross everybody out? Get your programs here! You can't tell the mutilator from the mutilated without a program!

While the majority of the group is inland exploring, an unseen evil (George Eastman, doing double duty) decapitates one of the group left on the boat, takes the vessel off-shore and out of reach, and drags off our resident mother-to-be. Possibly to help heal her ankle? Maybe. But more likely so it can eat her fresh tasty fetus like so much Sapien veal. Mmmmm, so tender, so succulent, so free of sin (and carbs). Ever wonder why so many Republicans are against using aborted babies for stem cell research? Cuz they wouldn't have anything for Sunday Brunch if they let their main course be used by scientists for evil and ungodly things like curing diabetes or growing new limbs for people mutilated in wars or making big natural boobs for flat-chested women so they no longer need to stuff nasty artificial sacks in there instead… *shudder*.

While creeping around their new abandoned mansion digs after dark (instead of barricading themselves into a single room together like they should), the group finds one their member's friend alone in the basement, blind as a bat, covered in blood, and stabbing at the darkness with a butcher knife while yelling, "OOOOAAAHHHOOOAOHAHAOOOOAHAHAHHHHHH!". Once she's been calmed down and cleaned up, she goes on a brief rant about how her parents and everyone else on the island have been killed by a maniac who smells of blood, hence how she's apparently been able to stay out of his way all this time. I hope the rest of the movie doesn't take place in the unlit mansion like this, cuz if I have to stare at shadows and squint for the next hour, I'm going to be very unhappy when it's time to rate this flick. Seriously kids, there's a five minute "chase through a cemetery" scene that's not only too long, but everything is bordering on pitch with the exception of the occasional lightning bolt that serves just to show us who it is that's running around and where all this frantic nothing is happening! Stop trying to fool yourself into thinking that D’Amato skimping on the lighting budget so he can buy more cheap whiskey is somehow “scary” or “suspenseful”. I'm getting horrible flashbacks of the 3 minutes car "chase" scene in Night Ripper...

Finally the monster reveals itself almost 50 minutes in as it attacks one of the guys protecting the blind girl. The Grim One (whose name is Nicos) looks a lot like my dad if he were ravaged with leprosy and hadn't been out in the sun for a good 7 or 8 months. Mangy beard, sickly grey skin, jagged apish teeth, receding hairline and 800lbs of crazy behind those eyes. I gotta admit, the guy creeps me the Hell out. After ripping out his victim's throat with his bare teeth (at least I'm pretty sure that's what happened amidst the barely lit scene and the muddy film transfer), the ghoul disappears into the night again, leaving Blindy untouched yet again as the rest of the group arrives to her cries. The next day, while searching for Carol, who ran off alone into the night, the group catches up to their mystery phantom woman and find her to be all too alive... right before she hangs herself. When Carol turns up, she tells us that the dead woman had taken her in the night before and been kind to her, before asking is Carol could "pardon" her. Whatever her crime(s), you know it's gotta have something to do with Mr. Munchy running around. Is she the deformed super freak's mother ala movies like Humungous, or is the man-monster connected to her in some other movie cliché type of way? Well, according to the dead lady's diary, it all has something to do with dead German tourists... It's always something to do with dead German tourists... Maybe if Fritz and Olga would just stay in their own country, none of the world's problems would have to happen!

Maggie's husband finds her alive and kicking in the Reaper's catacomb lair, seemingly none the worse for wear... until the bearded devil returns to kill them both and get down with that aforementioned fetus consumption... To be honest, the fetus scene just doesn't live up to the hype. Not only was it so dark I had trouble making out what it was that Grimmy was doing, but all he did was yank the California Cheeseburger out of Maggie and take a bite before the scene immediately cuts back to the mansion. Speaking of which, back at the mansion, somebody has uncovered the hidden bodies of those German tourists, tucked away inside a hidden corpse storage room behind a mirror. Yeah, old houses are filled with fun stuff like secret passages and crawlspaces and corpse storage rooms. That's part of the fun of an old mansion: finding all the wacky stuff put in by the eccentric former owners!... then using them to spy on your guests when they're using the bathroom... and posting the videos on the internet... and charging weirdoes $20 a month to watch them... yeah, old mansions are cool.

In standard slasher fashion, the unholy cannibal creature stalks the remaining cast from one end of the mansion to the other. Someone gets their throat ripped out, the Reaper gets dropped from the roof of the mansion, there's a pointless scene with a well (that’s a lot funnier than it is suspenseful, so stop fooling yourself), somebody attacks the monster with a pick-axe, and Big Nic’s unstoppable taste for organ meat proves to be his own downfall. Ah good, glad that’s over with.

In the pantheon of bad Italian slasher/cannibal/zombie flicks, The Grim Reaper is amazingly underwhelming. The sleaze and violence that you come to expect while going into such an undertaking are almost completely absent. Though the Reaper himself is a memorably terrifying looking creature in his own right, the sex and brutality just isn't there! Am I saying that the movie sucks because there aren't any titties or enough people getting their guts ripped out? No, because I don't need to watch greasy people get nasty on each other or rip each other's heads off to have a good time. But, think about your standard Spaghetti exploitation flick. Got a good picture of it in your mind? Okay, now, imagine if you took out all of the sex, trimmed down a fair amount of the graphic violence, and then you turned the contrast on your television WAY down until it almost feels like you can't tell whether your set is actually on anymore. What's left? A big boring ugly blur. I was waiting for this gruesome "fetus feast" scene that everybody and their weird mother who lives in the fruit cellar has been telling me about to maybe make me throw up some Cheerios or something and turn my opinion around by the time it happened. But, just like the rest of the movie, the magic just wasn't there. Boo. It's done. Time to get on with our lives.