Dark Island
When sorting through movies and coming across a Thai import DVD of a low budget b-movie not yet released in the United States and that you bought months ago, you know you have too many movies in your collection. How do you forget about something like that? So I threw my import DVD of Dark Island into the player and sat down to watch it. When it was over I realized my first instinct upon buying it, stashing it away unwatched and promptly forgetting about its existence, had been the correct one.
Now stop me if any of this sounds familiar:
Characters stranded on an island.
Flashbacks showing us specific episodes in the lives of certain characters back on the mainland prior to their ending up on this island designed to provide them with some backstory and give them a reason why they make some of the decisions they do on this island.
Smoke monster terrorizes characters on island.
Dark Island is not a complete rip-off of “Lost”. The characters come to this island voluntarily, sent by a corrupt corporation on a mission to find a missing research team. There’s no mysticism involved with the island, nor does the smoke monster owe its origins to anything more than a scientific experiment gone awry for that matter, and at no point in time do we find out that all these people are dead or sitting together in some spirit realm waiting to go to heaven. Oh yeah, there are also bits lifted from Resident Evil flicks.
Even so, were you to show someone Dark Island and tell them it was a “Lost” mockbuster The Asylum produced five years ago I highly doubt very much if they would question your word choice.
On what could be considered something of an upside Dark Island features something “Lost” left out which never ceases bringing smiles to myself for inexplicable reasons: gas guns. Don’t ask me why watching guns shoot gas amuses me; just trust me when I say that it does. The movie’s best sequence has a guy armed with a gas-spraying rifle fending off the spinning smoke monster surrounding him, which is pretty nifty action. Too bad it only amounts to a couple seconds of excitement amid 80 minutes of tedium.
Dark Island is boring. Very boring. The characters are bores, and the actors playing them do nothing to help matters through their uniformly wooden performances. The plot is a tired cliche fest that doesn’t hold up under even an ounce of scrutiny. Some people aren’t who they appear to be and have different agendas, resulting in plot twists that might’ve been effective had the events surrounding them not been such a poorly constructed crashing bore.
The snail’s pace was such that within moments after the opening titles hit my screen I was already feeling the urge to reach for the fast forward button. The boat trip to the island is four solid minutes of minimal dialogue and inaction that feels like it takes three times longer than it actually does. Many times I found myself watching very little take what felt like a very long time to play out.
It is just too bad that the smoke monster, which when chasing people on the screen and disappearing seems to be very interesting visually, does not get more time. But I suppose it’s cheaper to make characters pale and have them run around with contact lenses that are painted black doing a zombie routine after being infected by some kind of contagion that will eventually turn them into predatory smoke. The makeup’s fine; I’m just partial to gratuitous smoke monster attacks over zombie.
And more gunfights with gas. You can never have too many gas gunfights.
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