Fantasy Island

Isle Be Back

Fantasy Island
2020 USA Directed by Jeff Wadlow
UK cinema release print. 

Warning: Small spoilers.

Yeah, I kinda wondered if this would happen. Hot on the heels of the fairly recent The Banana Splits Movie (reviewed by me here), which took an old TV show from decades ago and turned it into a horror film, we have yet another beloved (to many, I’m sure) TV show, this time from the late 1970s/early 1980s, which has undergone a horror movie make over. This time it’s Fantasy Island although, for some reason, the UK certification card billed it as Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island... I don’t see why because it is definitely featuring at least one (technically two) characters from the original TV show, where guests would arrive on the island by plane and Mr. Roarke, played by Ricardo Montalban, would greet them and use the magical powers of the island to give them their fantasy (the real one, not the one they thought they wanted) and teach them a life lesson about themselves in the process.

This time around, the wonderful Michael Peña, who you may remember from his comic turn in the Ant Man movies, replaces Montalban as Roarke and we even have a kind of replacement for his sidekick Tattoo but, the way this happens would probably constitute a major spoiler so I’m not going to say much about that.

What I will say is that yes, it pretty much follows the original formula of the TV show to the letter and, yes, it’s definitely turned into a horror/adventure vehicle... albeit a kind of family friendly one, to be sure. I mean, gosh knows how it managed to land itself with a 15 rating here in the UK... I think this one should probably be a 12 at the very most.

Okay, so this is kind of a fun film but its only going to work for you, I believe, if you are willing to accept the supernatural and magical properties of the island fairly early on. Don’t go expecting any scientific explanation for anything that’s going on in this movie because you certainly aren’t going to get one. In truth, this is a little more like reading one of those old 1950s EC Horror comics like Tales From The Crypt or Vault Of Horror and, if you’re expecting anything more sophisticated than that, then you may be in for a bit of a disappointment. I mean, when you see various bad guys... such as Kim Coates playing absolutely to type as a henchman... and their eyes suddenly explode in their sockets to emit a black ooze... you know there’s something less than scientific going on here, right?

Some of the acting in this is pretty good with Peña giving the film a much needed shot of gravitas in certain places and with an equally sobering performance from the always watchable Maggie Q as one of the guests. It’s nicely put together, not too flashy in terms of shot set ups... although there is a moment where the director seems to go deliberately overboard with vertical spaces made up from trees... and it’s edited in a way that you aren’t going to lose where everybody is. Why and how everybody is, however, is a different matter and I’ll come to that shortly.

Okay, so even if you can make friends with the lack of subtlety of the supernatural element in this movie, there are a few things in this which are not so great. One of them being the fact that the writers/director feel the need to telegraph certain elements such as one character who, right when she gets a nosebleed at the start with some sinister music playing, you know is going to be revealed as something less obvious than she at first appears. And you can see all those all important life lessons coming a mile off, to be honest.

Another thing is how it’s somehow trying to be some kind of ‘family friendly horror’ movie. It just doesn’t work and I’m sure there must be a much stronger cut of this movie out there because every time one of the human characters gets cut up, or whatever, it always seems to be just off camera with no red blood in sight. The only real blood is the black ooze from the eyeball pops in this, which I’m guessing is just a way of getting around certain censorship issues. Not that I particularly wanted to see various violent deaths etc but, honestly, the absence of follow through on the things you know are happening just means the film loses a certain amount of credibility, as far as I’m concerned. At least in terms of the overall tone of this movie.

I’m not even going to talk about one character reveal when, even though that character admits to be ‘acting’ in the earlier parts of the movie, still makes no sense in terms of the character motivations and the actions of said character in one of the earlier scenes.

And then there’s the ending. Honestly, I’ve got no idea what is going on or why any of the ‘surviving’ guests are leaving the island without trying to kill Roarke and his crew. I’m really not sure why no questions are going to be asked when various ‘guests’ don’t survive their stay and, yeah, just really baffled by the bizarre denouement on this one.

The one shining light for me, which was worth the price of admission, was Bear McCreary’s score, which gives a good sense of uneasiness throughout. Alas, at time of writing this, the soundtrack is only available as a dumb electronic download rather than a proper CD but I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it gets a real release at some point. We’ll see what happens.

So, yeah... short review but there’s really not much more to say about this one. Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island is not a film I could really recommend to anyone. It’s fine in places but it’s not brilliant and, while I’m glad I saw it, I don’t think I’d need to ever watch it again. That being said, I do hope this somehow allows for other revamped TV shows from the 1960s - 1980s, redone in the horror genre because, like The Banana Splits Movie before it, sometimes this is a good idea.

Die Hard 4.0 (aka Live Free Or Die Hard)

Yippee Ki Hard

Die Hard 4.0 (Live Free Or Die Hard)
2007 USA/UK
Directed by Len Wiseman
20th Century Fox Blu Ray B

Warning: Spoilers exploding out of the paragraphs

John McLane never had a cell phone in the first three Die Hard movies.

Amazingly, when you look back at the way technology has progressed over the last few decades, mobile phones were not something that almost the entire population had with them back then. Only a minority of people would have them. In fact, in the first two films in this franchise McLane is shown to be “technically up there” in that, well... he has a pager.

It’s a good job mobile devices weren’t so prominent when it came to writing the scripts for those first three movies because, sad to say, technology has made their plot lines redundant in a modern world. In their first one, if McLane had been carrying a phone, he could have just called for police assistance and that would have made for one short movie. Ditto for the “communications outage” in the second movie. A quick call to one of the planes (oh, by the way, when you land, your sea level has been dropped by 100 metres) and the story is completely junked. And in the third movie, running around from phone booth to phone booth to get the next instruction.... err... yeah, right.

However, Die Hard 4.0 (as it is known in this country) was made twelve years after that initial trilogy. It is set in a world where the character and his ways are sadly out of step with the era. So what do the script writers do to balance the necessities of this character, in terms of giving audiences the kind of situations they are familiar with from John McLane... well, they make sure the phone networks are switched off as a part of the plot. A plot which is based on a newspaper article, in this case, and not on a random script or novel like the other sequels prior to this.

I remember thinking it was a bit late to make a Die Hard movie in 2007. I figured the writers would make a load of mistakes and concentrate purely on the action at the expense of plotting and character detail. Well... I was wrong (they saved making all those mistakes for the fifth movie, reviewed here). This fourth expedition for McLane is every bit as enjoyable as the previous installments (although the third movie is still my favourite) and, to boot, it’s the cleanest, nicest looking of the films to date with a beautiful sense of composition and some lovely colours pitched against each other in the shots. You might think this is at odds with the generally grimy milieu of the original films but, no, Wiseman manages to make it all work beautifully and, what’s more, it doesn’t just look good.

The plot is a little cliched in one hand... escort the witness (or hacker in this case) back to headquarters and don’t let him get killed. This plays out for the first third of the movie before the real story of a “fire sale” (the disablement of the IT systems across the city to render everyone, including all the authorities, pretty much powerless) kicks in properly and it becomes about McLane and his new hacker friend Matt (played expertly by Justin Long) taking on the bad guys and, incidentally, rescuing McLane’s estranged daughter Lucy (played by the always more than watchable Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who is taken hostage by the leading villains towards the end of the movie.

The story is really fine, putting McLane back in a situation where the odds are stacked against him and, also, there is the secret weapon of Kevin Smith (Silent Bob himself) playing a Star Wars obsessed super hacker who Willis also employed to rewrite the dialogue for his scenes. I gt a real kick out of seeing him in this and just wish he had a little more screen time throughout the film.

There’s one bad thing about this movie though... and that’s the credibility factor. Bruce Willis is fairly long in the tooth by now and, although he is in terrific shape, there’s no way you can really buy into him winning fist-fights with the likes of Maggie Q and Cyril Raffaelli (a man who, prior to this, I’d seen acrobatically beat up whole roomfuls of people with his bare hands as one of the two main action leads in the District 13 series). Sometimes the baggage an actor brings with him to a movie is good and, other times, it can strain credibility a notch, it has to be said.

But who cares, Die Hard 4.0 is brilliant, sometimes way over-the-top (jumping your car to take out a helicopter) fun and you still really care for the character and his friends in this one. There is one sad thing, however...

Michael Kamen, the composer of the first three Die Hard movies had already died tragically young by the time of this one. Here, the musical reigns are handed over to composer Marco Beltrami but, I’m happy to report, he does a good job. Writing in a modern action style while still weaving in some of Kamen’s original themes and ways of handling certain situations from the first three movies. It falls somewhere in between an homage to the late, great Kamen and a strong, appropriate score and it succeeds brilliantly on all levels. I wouldn’t have expected anyone to be able to recreate Kamen’s style all that easily but, in the scenes where that kind of respectful tribute to the franchise history is called for, Beltrami does really well and my respect for him truly went up a notch on this film. He does it even better in the fifth movie in the series. Nice work.

And that’s about all I have to say about this one. A great movie and a great Die Hard movie. Mission brief fulfilled. Job done.

You can read my reviews to the others in the series here...

Die Hard
Die Hard 2: Die Harder
Die Hard With A Vengeance
A Good Day To Die Hard