Director Jeff Wadlow
Genre Adventure | Comedy | Horror
Cast Lucy Hale, Michael Peña, Maggie Q, Portia Doubleday
Rating PG-13
Release Date February 14th, 2020
“A horror adaptation of the popular ‘70s TV show about a magical island resort.A horror adaptation of the popular ‘70s TV show about a magical island resort.”
The poster points out that Fantasy Island is from the producer of Get Out and Halloween which is true, but what they fail to mention is the writers are also responsible for the POS horror film Truth or Dare, which is also from Blumhouse. Hmm…
Yet another sad and pathetic excuse for a horror movie, Fantasy Island is about as scary as the sanitation worker episode of Sesame Street, "but where does all of the trash go?!". Well we now have the answer to that question, all of the trash found its way to the script for this movie. For the love of creative expression, I hope the excuse is that the talentless studio heads stepped in and wrecked this script because if the writers are fully responsible for this dribble, they deserve to be banished from Hollywood forever. Director Jeff Wadlow, who is also responsible for Never Back Down and Kick-Ass 2, both of which I enjoyed, seems to have forgotten how to direct.
The television series the film is based on, also titled Fantasy Island, ran from 1977-1984, totaling 154 episodes when it was all said and done. Now that is pretty damn impressive if you ask me, and certainly provides a plethora of source material to work with. I was born the year the show concluded so I can't say I have any memory of it, but I can say with a certain level of certainty that if the show was even a tenth as bad as the movie, it wouldn’t have survived a single season. The shows creator Gene Levitt, who passed away in 1999 at the age of 79 (RIP), is likely working on a way to come back to life long enough to murder everyone responsible for trashing the last thing he worked on before hanging up the typewriter. But I will say that this, the movie version of Fantasy Island has me wanting to actually watch the show to get this bad taste out of my mouth, so I guess that's a positive. They also made an interesting decision not to cast one of the most important roles from the show, which is that of the character Tattoo, Mr. Rourke’s right-hand man, played by Paris born actor Hervé Villechaize (seen below alongside the original Mr. Rourke, actor Ricardo Montalban). Where is the controversy surrounding a decision to essentially take away an opportunity for an actor with dwarfism to be in the film? I guess we are too busy praising Parasite for it’s groundbreaking look at the issues of social class.
I usually try and touch on the quality of the acting, but every now and again it is so dramatically overshadowed by the poor writing and directing that you can’t tell which way is up. Now I love me some Michael Peña, but who doesn't right? I imagine he was out on a yacht somewhere 6 or 7 pina colada's deep and received a phone call asking if he wanted to be in this movie and he agreed without actually taking a look at a script. Studio probably figured we pay him a healthy sum to get some name recognition and throw in a few actors willing to work for fairly cheap and who look good on the screen to round out the cast. Some will certainly argue that Maggie Q is a talented actress, and sure she has a decent resume and is a nice balance of sexy and badass, but aside from her role as Nikita she's not exactly lighting the big-screen on fire especially when it comes to feature films. Lucy Hale was fine and nice to look at as usual. I did enjoy the roles played by a few of my favorite television actors including Kim Coates (Sons of Anarchy), Michael Rooker (The Walking Dead), and Jimmy O. Yang (Silicon Valley). But again, I place the majority if not all of the blame on the writing and directing because mediocre acting can be easily ignored in a horror movie and this has been proven time and time again.
Now the word on the street is Fantasy Island was originally slated to be an R-rated film, until some gentrified focus group watched it and said it made them upset (this is a guess of course, but it's an educated guess). Tale as old as time right? Sure is. I mean how many times will Hollywood allow this to happen? Like do they not understand that a large population of avid movie fans still want to see gore, violence, and you guessed it, nudity, or am I crazy and did the 90's not actually happen? Fantasy Island is what's wrong with the film industry when it comes to horror movies, yet we continue to hear that studios are reluctant to invest money in a horror movie for fear of losing money so we have to scratch and claw to get our hands on these indie gems that are 10 times better than movies like this. Someone needs to slap these idiots across the face and say stop making piece of crap horror movies and perhaps the genre will begin to pay dividends once again. We may get lucky and the R-rated cut of the Blu-ray release is substantially better, but we will see (although the bar has been set pretty low).
I think I veered off track a bit but did I mention Fantasy Island sucked and isn't worth your money? Okay good, maybe once it hits Netflix or gets a run late night on FXX you can check it out. (the below image is actual footage of the cast getting as far away from this movie as possible after realizing how bad the writing and directing was going to be).
