By Shane Conto
How many of you have seen the original Fantasy Island? This was a show featuring Ricardo Montalban in a nice white suit and a little person making people’s dreams come true. But this was a show popular back in the 1970’s. And had a standard dramatic tone. Then came 2019 when a trailer dropped. Beautiful island visuals, Michael Pena in a nice white suit, people’s fantasies coming true…could it be? It was true! Someone thought of the bright idea to remake this classic series after decades. But there is a twist! This time…it is scary. What if all of your fantasies took a demented turn for the worse on Fantasy Island? That is the basic premise of Blumhouse’s version of this story. Jeff Wadlow was tasked with creating this horror remake. Wadlow’s previous work has ranged from controversial to disappointing but with an upside with his vision.
Unfortunately, the largest twist of Fantasy Island is that it isn’t really scary. The film leans hard on the timeless troupes of jump scares with obnoxious blasts of music over something that pops up in the background or pans into your face. But there is no subtle approach to these scares and they are equally predictable. Creepy music…pans to the right because something must be there…but nothing…casually pans back to the left…BAM! There is something there. How many times can you use the same scare? Speaking of twists, this film is filled to the brim with twists and turns on a winding road of coincidence and shocks for the sake of shocks. Probably the most concerning aspect of this film is the fact that it has no discernable tone at all. Each person’s fantasy is completely different and is staged in different ways including tonally. There are cheesy romances, raunchy bros comedies, war dramas, and torture porn horror sequences. The film bounces between them messily all the way until these stories conveniently converge with the finesse of a sledgehammer. Do you remember the childhood days of playing with shapes and trying to smash them into the wrong holes on a board? This film’s direction is the adult version of that. Not to mention that this is a bloated 1 hour and 50 minutes that feels like it wore out its welcome at least 20 minutes before that.
But then there are the performances from a cast that is a strange mash-up of B-stars with a few potential new stars along with anchors like Michael Rooker and Michael Pena. Rooker does his standard grumpy middle-aged man schtick and Pena feels like he is on valium throughout the runtime. Maggie Q was an odd choice in this dramatic role but she honestly is one of the most believable performances. Lucy Hale is over-the-top and hard to take seriously despite her extended time on screen. Overall none of the performance really capture the audience’s attention or sympathies.
In the end, Fantasy Island was a bold choice to take an old and outdated property and try to inject life through a new genre and a meaningful cautionary tale (that really falls flat as the message is surface level and too on the nose). A horror film that is never horrifying with comic relief that is never quite funny, this one is a missed opportunity. The only saving grace is that is watchable for what it is and the story did keep me on my toes. I didn’t hate it but that isn’t the best thing you can say about a movie.