First and foremost, I am not the sort of person who throws a hissy fit if there is one change at all to a story. I'm actually the sort of person who makes a big effort to judge adaptations on their own terms. But here I can really see why people would dislike this version, adaptation-wise it is the worst based on the book and even on its own terms it's a somewhat redeemable(if not by much) mess. If it was a book I wasn't a huge fanatic about but still appreciated, I wouldn't be so worried. Here though, we are talking about a masterpiece of a book, a definite contender for Agatha Christie's(The Queen of Crime) best book.

Of the versions I've seen(1945, 1965, 1974 and this),the best by far is the 1945 Rene Clair version. While I am not a fan of the ending, though the ending of the book can be seen as unfilmable, the film really scores in the suspenseful atmosphere, the claustrophobic tension of the atmosphere, the witty script and the top-notch cast. I enjoyed the 1965 version(though I shall see it again to see if it holds up),and while it is full of major problems the 1974 film is better than I'd heard it cited to be. This version though, despite some redeeming values, I found very difficult to get into.

The redeeming qualities are these. Firstly, the locations. While it lacks that suspenseful, claustrophobic touch, they still looked lovely though you did wish for more. Secondly, the whole thing with the lions was well done I thought. Finally, there were three performances that I thought were quite good. The best of the cast was Donald Pleasance, who gives a quietly incisive and intelligent performance as the Judge. Following very close behind is Herbert Lom, whose dotty but quite touching General is the best of any the film versions of the book. Sarah Maur Thorp is a credible if occasionally too erratic Vera.

Unfortunately the rest of the cast are nowhere near on the same plane. Brenda Vaccaro doesn't do anything with her role, and it doesn't help in the slightest that Marion Marshall not only doesn't have any substance at all but also how she written gives the indication that there were two scripts crammed into one and it all becomes far too left-field. Neil McCarthy's Marston is too much of a caricature, even for a character that doesn't last very long. Warren Berlinger is not a complete disaster, but for my tastes more subtlety and less bellowing was needed for Blore. For me the Rogers were acted with no real distinction, he rather lumbering and she too shrill. Then there are the two really bad performances. The Lombard of Frank Stallone is an absolute blank, but the worst was Yehuda Efroni who goes well overboard in the over-acting department.

Marion Marshall is not the only character though who is written poorly. Every single character is like a very emotionally cold cardboard cut-out. And to make things worse, any development into their past crimes are either severely underdeveloped(ie. Vera's, too ambiguous) or badly distorted(ie. Marion Marshall, a real head scratcher that was). Some like the judge weren't even touched upon.

Any attempts for suspense are diluted quite badly here as well for many reasons, considering that was a major component of what made the 1945 film and the book so enjoyable. There's the truly unimaginative and overly-obvious camera work and close-ups. There's the melodramatic and out-of-sync reactions to the voice from the gramophone record, in by far the most badly done version of that crucial scene(done brilliantly in the 1974 film I thought). There's the often tedious pacing, I know the book unfolded slowly but that was Christie's style, the lack of anything what kept the book alive made for a very dull watch. There's the murders that came across as crude and had none of the creepiness or sense of dread they ought to have done, only Rogers' had a semblance of an eerie quality to it.

Of course you can add to these a very out-of-place Noel Coward song, if not as out-of-place as the one for the 1974 film, a very trite and stilted script and lethargic direction and you have a disappointing mess that has the locations, lions and three good(but not truly great) performances saving it from total doom. 4/10 Bethany Cox

Agatha Christie - well as source material I reckon. And let me say that I do like crime movies who involve a whodunnit mystery. So I may be already a bit enticed ... more than others probably. Also quite fun to see Sly Stallones brother in this and who he is and what he plays. Now PC culture may have issues with the title and I am actually surprised that in the 80s that still was a thing that was being said ... actually I am not too surprised, still just saying.

In Germany they translated the ten little indians story in something ... one may call even more sinister. It involves the derogatory term that starts with an "N" - I'm not going to use it - I doubt they would use it in movies nowadays either. Actually they didn't even use it back then (which also would make no sense if you really think about it),this movie was called "Deadly Safari" - already translated. And gives you the same amount of what is about to happen here as is the original title ... just less offensive. Not the best adaptation, but still decent enough to say the least.

This is the first "grown-up" mystery I ever read, and it remains my absolute favorite to this day--which is why whenever I encounter a new film adaptation, I keep hoping it would do the book justice--but none of them ever do, and this particular version is the worst of the lot.

The story should be familiar to everyone: ten people are assembled in an isolated location, are accused of murder by their unseen host, and are executed one by one, with the methods of their deaths corresponding to a child's nursery rhyme. And one thing this version does have going for it is that it avoids tampering with the rhyme as the 1965 and 1974 versions do. Likewise, the crimes each of Mr. Owen's guests have committed also remain largely unchanged from the novel (the sole exceptions being Blore's and Marion Marshall's).

But what makes this version so thoroughly unwatchable is how badly the plot is served by the locale, and how badly one has to stretch credulity to believe that something like this could happen as the script writers tell us it does. For example, in her first scene, Mrs. Rodgers complains about "lions and tigers" all around the camp, and later, during the search for Mr. Owen, several characters see one--and yet, immediately afterward, one of the characters is willing to spend the night on an isolated hilltop, without any fear of becoming a lion's midnight snack. In fact, we never see or hear the lions at all after the search; once they've served their purpose of creating tension during the scene in question, they apparently vanish into thin air.

Another reviewer has pointed out that too much is out of Mr. Owen's control, and that's 100% accurate; there's simply no way Mr. Owen could have arranged for all of this, especially so far from his home country. The character has no contacts nearby, no agents, nobody to set up the safari, no way to get the natives to isolate the doomed party, no way of making sure everyone meets the end s/he deserves. Moreover, Owen is strangely passive throughout the story; he doesn't set in motion the chain of events that lead to the fifth, sixth, and seventh murders, but relies entirely on chance and opportunism, and it's simply impossible for him to commit the second.

Lombard is finally the soldier of fortune he is supposed to be, rather than the engineer of previous adaptations--but it completely strains credulity to the breaking point to think that he would not have had his own supply of ammunition, rather than having to filch Marston's. And when Lombard finally succeeds in radioing for help, and is told that a rescue plane would be launched "in the morning," it doesn't occur to him to tell whoever's sending it that four people have already died and they need that plane NOW. He takes the delay far too passively for a man of his temperament--or at least, for a man of what his temperament should be.

The acting is uneven among all the actors, with the sole exceptions of Neil McCarthy, Sarah Maur Thorpe, and Yehuda Efroni--and in Efroni's case, it's because he's uniformly bad from start to finish. His caricature of a performance starts out as distracting and ends up being just painful to watch.

Finally, the international cast of characters - three English, five American, one Romanian, one German - is a problem that plagues all four English-language adaptations and especially this one, because how would Owen even have heard about all of them in the first place? The whole point is that no one knows that these people have committed murder; all of the deaths in their pasts have been put down either to accident, natural causes, or the normal course of war or the legal system, but Owen, owing to his position *in his own society,* is able to find people to tell him what really happened. How would Owen have discovered the "truth" about the deaths of both Beatrice Taylor and Heinrich Domeratsky - deaths that take place 6500 miles and 15 years apart?