ISLAND OF THE DEAD

MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS. TO BE HONEST I REALLY DON'T GIVE A TOSS ANY MORE.

Maybe it's time to have another clearout of the rental queue, but I'm just not getting the goods any more. To have to plod through the tiresome I Didn't Come Here To Die is depressing enough, and I'm probably due substantial damages from having watched it, but to then have this unutterable excuse for garbage in the same evening is tantamount to a war crime. I should be in line for counselling, or something in the Birthday Honours at the very least. In all seriousness: how dare you put this shoddy and incompetent bilge onto the shelves and expect me or anyone else to pay cold hard money for it? If you really want to be treated as a professional filmmaker, how about not conning your audience with this inexcusable ordeal? That the genius auteur evidently couldn't direct his own piss against the side of a barn should, in any sane world, be enough to convince him not to try and direct a film. But he has.

Island Of The Dead (also known as Immortal Island) concerns the usual boatload of photogenic cardboard dullards heading off for a Caribbean island for an extended vacation of lounging around in swimwear and taking lots of drugs. But the drugs they end up with are stolen from the local tribal village: they're a key ingredient in local witchcraft rituals and are rumoured to bestow immortality on the users. As they each indulge, they're suddenly chased by tribal assassins and hacked to pieces; the sole survivor is picked up by the cops and the FBI looking to take down a drug gang....Or something like that: half the dialogue is lost in poor sound recording and mixing as well as the non-performances. Bottom line: nearly everybody dies horribly, hooray.

It's one of those movies in which one of the characters disappears early on and none of her friends seem remotely interested in finding her, and they'd sooner have some more drugs rather then go out and look for her when she's been missing for a day and a half. It's one of those movies where casting was determined on the basis of how you fill out a bikini or how you look with your shirt off, never mind that you have the line reading skills of a Queen Anne chair (the lead investigator is no more an FBI agent than I am the President of Botswana). It's one of those movies that's structured almost entirely in flashbacks (and flashbacks within flashbacks) by characters to events they weren't a party to and couldn't have known about. It's one of those movies where most of the action is shot in near darkness, burying whatever happens in the impenetrable murk. It's one of those movies where everyone on screen is an utter scumbag or a total moron and you couldn't care less what happens to any of them. It's also one of those movies that's been retitled and packaged with blatantly deceitful artwork to misrepresent the film as a zombie movie, which it absolutely isn't.

In short, it's one of those movies that really shouldn't have been made. Someone, somewhere along the line, should have read through the script and asked whether this made a blind bit of sense. Someone should have fired the so-called director (ideally from a trebuchet) and replaced him with someone with the vaguest clue to what the hell he's doing. Someone at the distribution company should have wondered whether this slop was really good enough to go out to the public. None of this happened, and a film which is to all intents and purposes a turd is sitting there on the same shelf as real films made by people with a scratch of talent and intelligence. Blockbusters, Cash Converters, LoveFilm: wherever you see this title, don't pick it up. And if you find it used and soiled in a car boot sale for 49p, call the police. This is unacceptable.

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