At long last, because we have all been demanding it, here is the horror movie version of Fantasy Island. For the sake of everyone under around 35 years old, an explanation may be in order. Fantasy Island was a popular tv show in the late 70s/early 80s. I was born in 84 and don’t recall ever watching the show (though I remember the reruns playing on cable pretty often), but it was the kind of thing that was referenced and parodied so often that it was impossible to not know the gist of it. Basically, people go to an island where their fantasies come true and their wishes are granted, sometimes supernaturally. I always assumed that the show was basically a drama because it didn’t look either funny or exciting. It sure as fuck didn’t look scary, which is a tradition that’s carried on by this film.
I honestly thought that this was a joke the first time that I heard about it. Making a horror version of Fantasy Island is something that you drunkenly think is brilliant at last call, not something that you spend millions of dollars on after you sober up the next day. But then I thought about it some more and started seeing some potential here because the concept could be used as a sort of monkey’s paw, be-careful-what-you-wish-for horror scenario. Not original, but I thought it might have potential. I was wrong. The biggest problem is that the writers put zero imagination into the fantasies themselves, seemingly because they were too busy coming up with the approximately 92 asinine plot twists in the last twenty minutes.
For a movie that’s supposedly about fantasy fulfillment, man did they pick some people with boring fantasies. My fantasies typically involve Catwoman, Wonder Woman and a buffalo (live or stuffed, preferably stuffed for safety sake). Not these people. One guy’s fantasy is to serve in the army, a wish that’s actually quite easily fulfilled without a magical island. One woman wants a second chance with the man that she now realizes she should have married, apparently not realizing that a phone call could help with this. Two half-brothers want to….I’m not sure. Their wish isn’t exactly articulated, but it seems like they want to be powerful bigshots of some sort. It’s vague enough to have vague consequences, though. The most interesting thing about these guys is that they were clearly originally written as a gay couple and switched to half-brothers at the last minute, but they are still acting like a gay couple. I’m guessing that’s why most of their dialogue is simply reminding us that they are, in fact, brothers. The only one that’s potentially interesting is the girl that wants to take revenge on the girl that bullied her in high school. That’s petty as hell, but a solid setup in a horror movie. It goes nowhere, though.
There will be spoilers here because I can’t describe the true idiocy of this plot without spoilers. All of those pathetic fantasies that I described are actually bullshit, because this is all the fantasy of one girl (the one that wants revenge on the high school girl). You see, there was a guy that died in a fire and revenge girl wants vengeance because the others could have potentially saved him. Couple of things here. First, there is no way she could have known that they could have potentially saved him. Second, and most importantly, they went on one date. One fucking date. This girl, who has his picture as her phone background, has concocted an elaborate revenge plot involving a supernatural island because of a guy that she went out with once. Guys, I have some advice: If you go on one date and she starts taking pictures of the two of you and immediately uses the pictures as her background picture, you need to run. Leave. Get the hell out of there because you are on a one-way trip to crazy town and she’s the mayor. It’s rare that a movie’s big reveal is so stupid that one of the characters acknowledges that its stupid. It’s almost as if this was supposed to be a comedy, but the filmmakers didn’t get it.
Aside from the ridiculousness, this is one of the most tame, pathetic excuses for a horror film that you will ever find. I’ve ranted about PG-13 horror before and this movie is a perfect example of how that rating neuters a film. The fantasies are almost required to be boring and the consequences can’t rise above a Goosebumps level of horrific twists. The torture scene with the high school bully features such gruesome horrors as giving her a minor electrical shock and dumping a bucket of water on her. Terrifying! The movie didn’t need to turn into Cannibal Holocaust or something, but my friends and I did worse shit to each other in high school and that’s just because we were drunk. There isn’t really even a villain, except for an evil doctor (that looks like a cross between Dr. Satan and Dr. Giggles) that shows up periodically and is never explained. This is like baby’s first horror movie, if you happen to have a particularly skittish baby.
My biggest fantasy was getting off this island! De plane crash! Fantasy Island? More like Boredom Island! Am I right? Alright, I’m done with this dumpster fire.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Island_(film)#/media/File:Fantasy_Island_poster.jpg
