Fantasy Island (2020)
Directed by Jeff Wadlow
Oh god, Fantasy Island. Can we be done with these? Can we be done with crappy horror movies getting dumped onto an innocent world? I thought we had escaped the majority of these when January turned out to be a pretty decent month for horror, but it turns out that studios were saving them all for February instead. I hope the Invisible Man is good because after watching Fantasy Island, and knowing that I have to watch Brahms: The Boy II next, I am dreading going back to a movie theatre. So yeah, you can probably guess whether or not I liked Fantasy Island.
Dear God Why
Before we get into the plot, which you mostly know if you’ve seen any of the trailers, I need to talk about why this movie was made. Who wanted this? Who was begging for a revival of a TV show that hasn’t been relevant for decades with the added twist of it being a horror movie? I’ve never seen an episode of this show and I can’t imagine the people who really liked it would be down to have it changed like this. But maybe I’m wrong, maybe everyone who watched Fantasy Island when it premiered has been clamoring for this movie since. I hope not though, because this movie is real bad.
The Plot Which We All Know.
The plot, if you can call it that, surrounds a group of folk who arrive at Fantasy Island after winning some contest and hope to experience all their wildest fantasies come to life. Some have straightforward fantasies, like revenge on a childhood bully or living lives of excess, while others want to fix the mistakes of their past. After the fantasies begin, it becomes clear that something sinister is going on when these fantasies aren’t quite what everyone wished for. Oh, also the opening scene is a woman at the resort being abducted by goons so you know from scene zero that this place is bad news. What great foreshadowing.
Not At All FunnyBad
If it’s not clear already, Fantasy Island is not a good movie. I doubt anyone is surprised by that but the ways that Fantasy Island is bad were actually shocking. Yes, the premise is a needless twist on the literal Genie/Monkey’s Paw “wishes might not come out how you wanted” gimmick, but that’s not why it doesn’t work. The first ⅔ of Fantasy Island, where that is in full swing, aren’t terrible, they’re just middling and uninteresting. It isn’t until the last act that everything bad about the movie merges together to form a congealed mass of awful.
My Legally Obligated List Of Positives
But before we get to spoilers, let’s talk about any slight positives I can find here. They somehow managed to snag Michael Rooker, who appears in none of the promotional material as part of his contract I assume, who is the only person in the cast able to read these bone-headed lines with any modicum of dignity. To be fair, most of the actors are fine, the performances are pretty standard but that’s par for the course with this type of movie. Um, there’s a good mix of locations, so the fantasy sequences all have a distinct feel, so that’s nice. Also, this film entertained the pre-teens who shared the theater with me, so someone got some enjoyment out of it.
No One Has Ever Spoken Like This.
The real badness of Fantasy Island starts with the script, specifically the dialogue. Everything everyone says is stilted in a way that’s specific to bad movie dialogue wherein all characters loudly and constantly voice every inner thought and bit of emotional turmoil they have. Characters will loudly announce how they can’t accept happiness because they don’t believe they deserve it, that two squabbling punks remind someone of their daughter who they “never made things right with”, and so on and so forth. No one speaks like that and it never stops being awful and jarring. The script problems don’t end there. Even though our story starts out nice and simple, things quickly become contrived and confusing. I will not waste the brainpower necessary to try and explain it, so please trust me that a truly ludicrous plot is set up, all for THE TWIST.
Checks Every Box Of “Villain Is Crazy” Stereotypes
Throughout Fantasy Island, the fantasies of all the guests slowly become dark versions of what the guest wanted. This goes unexplained until the last act when we learn that this entire movie has been set up by the machinations of one person, the young woman who was bullied in high school. Her justifications don’t stop at being bullied though, the real reason she hates all the main characters is that they were all involved in the death of a young man who she wanted to woo. Let me lay this on the line: the villain of this movie is a disturbed young woman who, after getting bullied so harshly as a child that she had to drop out of school, somehow got onto this island and used its magic power to torture and attempt to kill everyone who wronged her after they “stopped” her from getting a boyfriend.
You Know The Drill
Maybe there’s some Carrie-Esque way this could have been presented as the tragic ending of a young woman’s innocence. But why do that when you can instead just declare her to be crazy, she did go to therapy after all. To say this movie is pointless is an understatement, there isn’t anything worth remembering about this movie, and even though it is pretty terrible, it isn’t something I would recommend watching to anyone. You could do worse, but there is no reason to see this in a theatre.
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