Director: Jeff Wadlow
Writers: Jeff Wadlow, Christopher Roach
Stars: Michael Peña, Maggie Q, Lucy Hale
Run Time: 1 Hour, 49 Minutes
Link: https://amzn.to/2FNk4EI
Synopsis
A woman runs through the jungle at night, pursued by men with flashlights. She approaches the big house on the island and goes inside. The phone rings, and it’s Mr. Roarke. Someone comes in and grabs her, carrying her out of Mr. Roarke’s office. Credits roll.
The plane. The plane is here. “Smiles everyone!” Commands Roarke. Various people get off the airplane, and it all looks just like the old TV series. “Congratulations to each of you for winning the contest,” says Julia. “Anything and everything can happen here,” she says. An evil-looking Damon, played by Michael Rooker, is hiding in the bushes watching it all.
Julia shows one of the guests her room, and on the way out, gets a nosebleed. They all settle in until evening, when Mr. Roarke finally makes an appearance. Patrick is a soldier, Melanie has a photo of her ex on the nightstand, J.D. and Brax are brothers. There are only two rules: only one fantasy to a guest, and you must play out the fantasy to the end.
The fantasies begin. J.D. and Brax go to a huge house party, where Brax has a vision of a man with burns all over his body. Gwen wants a “do-over” for her regrets. Patrick is a failure at getting enlisted; something went wrong, and he wants to be a soldier. Melanie wants revenge on the school bully. We quickly see that there is a lot of snake imagery all over the island.
Melanie finds her archnemesis, Sloane, tied up in a glass room. Wow, what a realistic hologram, she thinks. She presses the buttons, and bad things happen to Sloane. Melanie quickly figures out that Sloane is real which she didn’t believe at first.
Patrick gets dropped off in the jungle with a backpack full of military stuff. He’s quickly taken prisoner by… other soldiers.
J.D. and Brax live together on the mainland, and it’s really holding J.D. Back, although he won’t admit it. Gwen starts to believe that this island version of Allen, her former fiancee, is real. Brax and J.D. find a panic room and well-stocked armory. Patrick meets his long-lost father, who’s supposed to be dead. Melanie watches the torture continue. Things starting getting out of hand for all the guests, and Damon seems to be in the middle of each of them.
Damon turns out to be a PI sent to investigate the island. He takes Sloane and Melanie to the heart of the island, and he says it’s all very evil. Meanwhile, Gwen finds out that all their pasts are intertwined. And it gets complicated…
Commentary
The start of the movie and the basic idea behind each of the fantasies comes right out of the old TV shows. Once things start turning bad for the guests, it’s a lot more brutal and graphic than anything Ricardo Montalban’s Roarke ever set in motion.
The fun of the original series was that there was no real explanation for how Roarke did anything. In the second TV series, starring Malcolm McDowell, it was all generically credited to magic. Here, Roarke explains everything in a little too much detail. I think explaining it all ruins it, because you know it could never be real. The fun of the original show was that with no explanation, the possibilities were endless. With this story, they’d be hard-pressed to make an interesting sequel, as we know too much.
I’ve read plenty of really bad reviews for the film, but overall, I did like it. It’s just as much a re-imagining as any of the other rehashed 80s properties that keep getting remade.