Movie Review: 'Fantasy Island'is Corporatized Horror Trash

Fantasy Island is a tedious attempt at reviving familiar I.P with a ‘twist.’ What if we take a forgettable 1970’s TV show and make it a horror movie? Clever? The result certainly is not clever or interesting. Rather, the remake of Fantasy Island as a Blumhouse horror movie with a sub-B-List cast reeks of corporate interference and of a director who is more hack than actual director, only capable of forgettably transmitting corporate dictates into a bland screen product.

Fantasy Island, for the unaware, is a reimagining of the 1970’s era Aaron Spelling produced spin-off of Love Boat. In the 70’s there was this odd trend of television series anthologies in which a series of small groups of low level recognizable performers were brought together to perform in small bite stories, mostly about dull romance and duller adventure. Love Boat had these minor stories on a cruise ship while Fantasy Island took place at a luxury resort, and I am not convinced that the producers weren’t making these shows just for the free vacations.

Somehow, through some acquisition shenanigans, the horror imprint, Blumhouse, wound up with the intellectual property of Fantasy Island and had no idea what to do with it. So, knowing that low budget horror was their meal ticket, and with a slightly familiar I.P on their hands, Blumhouse did what Blumhouse does and turned the vaguely familiar I.P into low budget horror, chock full of their usual boatload of market tested cliches and cast of pretty, forgettable characters.

Maggie Q stars in Fantasy Island as Gwen, a real estate magnate who has won a trip to an exotic island. She, along with Melanie (Lucy Hale), Patrick (Austin Stowall) and brothers, Brax (Jimmy O Yang) and J.D (Ryan Hansen), all appear rather surprised to all have won this fabulous vacation but they are dubious of their prize which promises to fulfill their deepest fantasies. That is, with the warning that all must live out those fantasies to their completion.

For Melanie, the fantasy is to go back in time and say yes to the man whose marriage proposal she rejected 5 years earlier. Upon righting this wrong, she is thrust into a future with all new memories and her true fantasy, having a child with this man. But, is this Gwen’s real fantasy? Gwen has one regret that goes even deeper than her rejecting the love of her life and it’s one that holds major implications on the plot.

Meanwhile, Melanie is on the island for some symbolic revenge against the girl who made her teenage years a living hell. She’s come to the island to enact torture upon what she believes to be a make believe analog of mean girl, Sloane Maddison (Portia Doubleday). In quite the twist, it turns out that the real Sloane is actually here and really being tortured and Melanie has to decide what to do and whether to save the person she despises the most.

The other characters have similar consequences to their particular fantasy and all of it plays out like an idiot’s guide to The Monkey’s Paw, W.W Jacobs’ legendary 1902 story about being careful what you wish for. Where that story was quickly paced with a resonant and well conveyed message, Fantasy Island is a slog that pauses repeatedly to catch the audience up and offer one nonsensical jump scare after another on the way to sloppy and random twist ending.

I haven’t even gotten to Mr Roarke, here played by Michael Pena. The television original Mr Roarke was iconically portrayed by Ricardo Montalban as a cross between the World’s Most Interesting Man from that beer commercial and a magical wizard. But, where that character held a strict moral code that meant fantasies had to end fairly, this Mr Roarke is quite boringly at the mercy of the island which is controlled by a vaguely powered supernatural force that can be anything to anyone.

The ending is supposed to give Roarke purpose and justify what has come before but sadly, Pena gives Mr Roarke no life or charm, and none of the astonishing charisma of Ricardo Montalban who singlehandedly willed the TV show into existing for as long as it did. Pena mistakes Montalban’s unforced cool for apathy and delivers a passionless, charmless, by the numbers performance.

Fantasy Island is a classically Blumhouse, too many cooks in the kitchen, market tested, horror product. The weak cast does little to elevate the proceedings, aside from Maggie Q whose remarkable beauty is, at the very least, a feast for the eyes. Outside of eye candy however, Fantasy Island has little to offer.