Review: Fantasy Island (2020)

Fantasy Island (2020)

Rated PG-13 for violence, terror, drug content, suggestive material and brief strong language

Score: 1 out of 5 (quality), 3 out of 5 (unintentional comedy)

I went into Fantasy Island, a supernatural horror reimagining of the late '70s/early '80s TV series, knowing exactly what to expect. It came from the same people behind 2018's Truth or Dare, director Jeff Wadlow, his co-writers/partners-in-crime Chris Roach and Jillian Jacobs, his leading lady Lucy Hale, and producer Jason Blum. Wadlow has proven himself capable of making good movies before, but for whatever reason, horror just isn't his bag. The only horror film of his that I ever liked, his 2005 debut feature Cry_Wolf, is notable for being a film that I felt alone in liking, going by reviews that are as bad as with many of his other movies. However, the thing about Wadlow's movies is that, even though they're often bad, they still manage to be entertaining, often in ways directly related to how bad they are. He is never a boring filmmaker; even if his visual style is fairly flat and reminiscent of a TV drama, his stories often fuse horror tropes with soapy melodrama and big, balls-out plot twists that are only ever scary in brief moments, if at all, but still often leave me amazed at just how out-there they get. Logic is secondary to the kind of "what the hell did I just watch?" feeling that you rarely see make it into the multiplex these days.

In other words, going into Fantasy Island, I expected not to be scared, but to be amused in a very particular way, the kind that I don't normally get when going out to the theater. And I was not disappointed. Fantasy Island was exactly the kind of movie I hoped it would be: campy, ridiculous, not scary in the slightest, at times displaying the potential to be something far better than it was, and an absolute blast to watch. It's not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it is bad in just the right ways, turning it from a mere mediocre slog like Countdown to some prime, grade-A schlock.

Fantasy Island is adapted from the late '70s/early '80s TV series of the same name that, if you were born after 1990, you probably know mainly from either your parents referencing it or from reruns on basic cable late at night. The premise of that show was that one Mr. Roarke, a sharp-dressed man played by Ricardo Montalbán, was the owner of an island resort in the South Pacific where guests could go to have their fantasies fulfilled no matter how outlandish and impossible they may seem. The source of these fantasies was never explained, though it was implied that Roarke was much older than he appeared and had personally known figures from myth and legend, and Montalbán said that he pictured Roarke as a fallen angel. Needless to say, the old saying "be careful what you wish for" often described the end result, as Roarke intended to teach moral lessons to his guests. This premise allowed the show to explore any genre it wanted from week to week, from romance to action to historical fiction to horror, and allow big-name guest stars a chance to get a one-off spot on a hit TV show.

As one can figure out from that poster up there, this version of the story goes straight for horror, the plot concerning five attractive young adults coming to Fantasy Island to have their wildest dreams fulfilled. Gwen Olsen wishes she could go back and accept a marriage proposal that she turned down five years ago, the stepbrothers JD and Brax Weaver want to live like decadent rich people, the police officer Patrick Sullivan wants to live his fantasy of being a soldier, and Melanie Cole wants to get revenge on Sloane, the girl who bullied and humiliated her in high school. Without spoiling anything further, Gwen wakes up the next day to find that she's now married with a young daughter she barely knows, JD and Brax get dropped into the shoes of criminals who stole their wealth from a very pissed-off drug lord, Patrick gets held captive as a POW by a squad of American soldiers who think he's an enemy infiltrator (and furthermore, the squad leader is his father, a special forces operator who died in combat when Patrick was little), and Melanie gets dropped into a scene straight out of Hostel where she is granted a slew of options to brutally torture Sloane in ways that are far more real than just the holograms she expected.

Plot-wise, the greatest problem the film suffers from, even more than its nonsensical twists and turns, is that it plays out like an anthology film until it doesn't. The first two acts are spent following four different plotlines that have only the faintest connective tissue, leading to jarring shifts in tone as the film flutters between the torture-porn slasher of Melanie's story, Patrick's action-thriller war movie, Gwen's domestic drama, and JD and Brax's comedic gangster flick. At the very least, some creative fun might have been had if the film attempted to connect the four; for instance, put Patrick in the squad of soldiers who raid JD and Brax's party in order to arrest them, or juxtapose Melanie's misplaced bitterness over her past with Gwen's misplaced regrets and have them both learn to move on from their pasts. Roarke, the central element connecting these stories together, was sorely underused, only playing a major role in Gwen's story and the climax even when, logically, he should have figured into one other character's story given the big twist. Said twist, meanwhile, completely contradicts everything that had been established about the character in question, leaving massive questions as to why that character was acting the way they did without any hints that they might actually have ulterior motives. Also, Michael Rooker shows up as a private investigator searching for the truth about the island, only for the film to do nothing with him. That's before you get into the zombies, at which point I need to point out that this film throws zombies into the third act just because.

Look, merely explaining how the plot of this movie goes is practically brain-breaking, so let's move on. The acting is mediocre across the board, with only Maggie Q as Gwen really coming away with her pride intact. Michael Peña lacked Ricardo Montalbán's charisma as Roarke and felt like a non-entity, even as he became central to the plot during the climax. Lucy Hale was decent at first as Melanie, the ingenue with a sassy streak, but soon proved unable to handle the directions the writing took her character; I did not buy for a second the emotional transformation she underwent. Everybody was saddled with terrible dialogue, though, so I can't really blame them for phoning in their performances and collecting their paychecks in between what was likely the real reason they signed on: spending a fun vacation in Fiji where they shot this. The pop culture references are extremely on-the-nose and often dated on top of it, a conversation that JD and Brax had with Patrick over them being stepbrothers (because Brax is Asian, you see) had me cringing throughout, and scenes of characters explaining their backstories consistently failed to get me interested in their one-note personalities. The production values all around, from Wadlow's direction to the special effects, felt made for TV, the PG-13 rating not helping in the slightest. This film looked and felt cheap, in a manner that the low budget alone does not excuse by a long shot, not when the makers of other Blumhouse films ranging from Upgrade to Get Out have managed to create lush, vivid, uncanny worlds that this film couldn't even with a true exotic resort destination at its disposal. The only scene that was truly effective at what it set out to do was when Melanie is in the booth torturing Sloane, not realizing that it isn't a game until it gets way too real for comfort, but that is only one scene out of many.

I did say, however, that this film managed to successfully hit the "so bad it's good" sweet spot, and that's because all the other scenes in this film, while often bad, were never dull. At around the halfway point, I gave up on hoping for this film to develop any kind of coherence, and eagerly started cheering on every ridiculous plot twist, emotional moment, and out-of-nowhere moment that it served up. I was living for the big, soapy melodrama that the third act devolved into, with twists and reveals for their own sake as characters violated all logic and reason with a gigantic, double-headed sex toy. At its worst, the dreadful dialogue swung back around and became one of the redeeming factors as I laughed and cringed in equal measure. The film did absolutely nothing to earn its big moments, which meant that I had a gigantic shit-eating grin on my face like the possessed characters in Wadlow's last movie, Truth or Dare, as they all unfolded. Cliches were faithfully adhered to, but surrounded by an utter mess of a film, these cliched moments felt jarring in their comparative normalcy, only furthering the wild shifts in tone that swung me around like I was on a rollercoaster.

The Bottom Line

If you want to have some gigantic laughs in the theater, this is the ticket for you. This adaptation of Fantasy Island was misguided from the start, and the finished product did nothing to rise above that, but it's still entertaining on merits that the people involved likely weren't intending. This is definitely one for Bad Movie Night.