Spoiler warning!
Man oh man… this movie. Fantasy Island is a Blumhouse production film, directed by Jeff Wadlow, and is a re-imagining of the TV show with the same name from the 1970s-1980s. In the original show, the premise was to bring guests from modern society onto a tropical island where they can live out their deepest fantasies. In the 2020 film of Fantasy Island it follows the same premise but alternates it into a horror film based on the guests’ deepest fantasies, and reveals supernatural elements are at play. I will not try to spoil this movie as much as possible, but some key points will be addressed.
The island has a host that goes by the name of Mr. Roarke, played by Micheal Pena, who is shown in the movie to be the “antagonist” but I simply couldn’t grasp it from the beginning. I will just get straight with everyone and just flat out say that this movie was terrible. The characters: a girl who was traumatized in grade school, a woman who lost her chance to marry the love of her life and start a family, a man who always wanted to be a soldier, and two brothers who wanted to have the time of their life I guess? And that brings me to my point about our characters in the movie, they are very forgettable and as soon as the movie wants you to feel empathy for the sad past that one of the characters experienced, they cut away to another character partying with models and doing drugs. By the halfway point in the runtime, I still didn’t care about what happened to them and even looked over to my friend, shaking my head at many times in the movie. A main reason for my head shakes, was the plot of the movie. Fantasy Island has one of the messiest plots in 2020, because it tries to show each of the main group’s fantasies while also adding a “horror” undertone. I will admit I am easy to scare in horror movies simply because jump-scares are loud and sudden, and are the most used tactic for Hollywood horror movies, but this movie was far from scary even with the cheap jump-scares. I found myself laughing in more situations than being scared, which is the biggest disappointment since it was advertised as a “supernatural horror” film. I also had the curse of hearing one of the cheesiest one-liners I’ve heard in recent years, “Come with me unless your fantasy is to die.” Am I making this up? No.
Fantasy Island is a movie with terribly written characters, whose actors somewhat save the quality of the film, but not enough to overlook the lazy writing. The plot, which felt like had many plot twists, made even the supernatural element of the island uninteresting. Overall I recommend for this movie to not be taken seriously and to wait for the film to be on streaming services. Thank you all for reading and I’ll see you in the next film!
TyFox Reviews 