The tyranist's thoughts
Way back before there was a Horror Film Compendium and two lads named Rish and tyranist were just high school buddies hooking up again in college, a series of rented horror flicks influenced them to start cataloguing horror movie cliches in a public forum. This was one of those movies.
So Muffy St. John has invited a boatload of friends out to her father's private island for a weekend of fun before they all graduate from college. What she hasn't told them is that there is a dark secret kept on the island and all of their lives are in danger. At least that is the movie that I was watching until they went and ruined the whole damn thing.
I really have a sort of love/hate relationship with this one and have since that fateful night back in 1998 that Rish and I sat down to watch this one together for the first time. We were just barely starting to talk about doing the Horror Film Compendium and were watching horror movies to compile a good list of cliches. It is unfortunate that most of the movies we watched at that time have never been reviewed here, but that is something we can work to rectify.
Anyway, back to why I both love and hate this movie. First the love. The first 80 minutes of the movie is a pretty tight little horror flick that plays well on the traditional slasher canvas. The acting is decent and the story nice. The deaths are minimally creative even if the violence is always off camera if it happens before cutting to a new scene at all. This really could have been a fine little horror movie.
And now for the hate and the SPOILERS. If you don't want to know how the movie ends, stop reading immediately and go rent it before it can be given away.
Okay, at the very end of the movie it turns out that the whole thing was a massive prank and that not only has no one died along the way, but they all went along with the whole thing once they were tagged. It is actually infuriating that this happens. While retrospect points out that not a soul died on camera and that the whole thing was leading up to this, it still pisses me off. I was enjoying a good horror movie until they did that. Then on top of the asinine "We're all alive" end of the movie, there is an extended sequence in which they basically do the same thing again. It sucks.
For historical purposes you might be interested to note that this movie was the inspiration for both the "It was all a dream" Ending and the No One Dies At All Skulls. Quite an accomplishment for one little film.
I rushed out and rented this when it got a new DVD release because I always felt that our site would be better off if we had bothered to review this movie (which I'd like to point out required that we watch it a second time). The DVD release is nice with the widescreen action and new sound mix, but I found the exact same joys and pains that I had the first time. If you've read this far and still want to see the movie, perhaps you should. Maybe if you just turned it off at 80 minutes you'd be happier though.