Starring: Michael Peña, Lucy Hale, Austin Stowell, Jimmy O.Yang, Ryan Hansen, Maggie Q, Charlotte McKinney, Evan Evagora, Portia Doubleday, Kim Coates, Michael Rooker Parisa Fitz- Henley
Distributor: Sony Pictures
Runtime: 110 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2020
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On hearing of Fantasy Island, some older audiences might be delighted. It was a favourite golden oldie television series making a comeback? Well, not exactly!
In recent years the Blumhouse Company has been very successful in producing smaller budget horror stories, drawing on all kinds of conventions and eagerly exploiting them. Audience response, younger rather than older, has been very positive. Some of their films have been Truth or Dare, Happy Death Day, Us.
But what has happened here is that the basic idea, created by Gene Levitt in the 1970s into the 1980s, has been appropriated for an island where the fantasies lead not just to a self-revelation, but to some horror experiences.
Once upon a time, there was the Hispanic Ricardo Montalban as Mr Rourke. Now there is the Hispanic Michael Peña as the 21st-century Mr Rourke. At the beginning, he has an assistant, Julia, a woman of mystery. But, at the end, as he calls out “the plane, the plane”, there is a brand-new Tattoo!
As expected, there is a motley group of guests each on their own quest. There is Gwen (Maggie Q) who regrets she did not accept a marriage proposal five years earlier. There is the young and brash Melanie (Lucy Hale) who is still resentful about a school bully and wants to see some justice done. Patrick (Austin Stowell) is an upright character with military ambitions, remembering his hero father. And then there is a kind of brash 21st-century Abbott and Costello type of partnership, stepbrothers, one tall and very white American, the other short and Asian (Ryan Hansen and Jimmy O.Yang). The stepbrothers have a very easy fantasy, some indulgence in the kind of Spring Break cavortings, drinking, sex…
There is some further complications on the island, a private detective who has been sent to investigate what on earth is going on. There are also some mercenaries, in link with the drug dealer who previously owned the island. Clearly there are going to be threats, guns (and several grenades).
As the film goes on, as we might have expected, people start to enter into other people’s fantasies, pursued also by the baddies, so that the plot becomes, to say the least, overly-convoluted. One must agree with one reviewer who remarked that in the middle of the filmmaking, they tossed all the pages into the air and decided to film whatever landed first. Which rather undermines the credibility, especially the revelation of the final villain.
This is one of Blumhouse’s lesser efforts, a reasonable idea but there is that tangle of the convolution.
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