Maragaret Denise Quigley (pictured above) plays Gwen Olsen, a business woman. Olsen visits the resort on fantasy island where she is tempted to pursue her deepest desires (Courtesy of wikimedia commons).
In 2019 director Jeff Wadlow gave the world Truth or Dare—a failed Blumhouse Productions experiment designed to make a terrifying flick out of a children’s game. This past weekend, Wadlow again attempted to create a horror movie from the painfully un-scary source material with Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island.
Adapted from the 1977 ABC television series of the same name, Fantasy Island runs the classic trope of “be careful what you wish for” into the ground with an apparently scary edge. Five guests are invited to Fantasy Island, a place where the island’s mysterious owner, Mr. Rourke—played by Michael Peña—agrees to bring their deepest fantasies to life. The caveat is that guests must live out those fantasies fully to their natural, and potentially harmful, conclusions.
Fantasy Island is full of interesting concepts. The film plays around with the unique idea of overlapping fantasies, trying to never let the audience know if a character is living out their own fantasy or that of someone else. This unique setup makes the film incredibly frustrating to watch given that nearly every aspect of the film’s execution falls flat on its face.
As a horror film, Fantasy Island leaves much to be desired. Most of the scary set pieces are comprised of jump scares that are too obviously set up to get any reaction. Not a single loud noise or gruesome image leaves an impression, and some can even come off as ironically hilarious. While some of the fantasies have mildly entertaining thriller elements, these sequences serve more for action than they do to develop any kind of suspense.
Fantasy Island also attempts comedy, and these moments are just as poorly realized as the film’s horror elements. The jokes are bottom of the barrel and never fit in with the movie’s tone. There are two particularly irritating characters—literal personifications of the “dude-bro” archetype—that only speak in high-fives and pop culture references that come off as desperate at best.
The film’s dialogue is atrocious. This hurts every performance in the film, as no actor on Earth could make these lines sound convincing. Every character merely exists to explain themselves to the audience, as if the screenwriters behind this train wreck had learned the “show don’t tell” rule backward.
The pacing and tone of the film are okay at some points but are overall inconsistent. The film’s narrative jumps between each character’s fantasy, and these separate stories don’t always flow well together during the first two acts of the film. One particular fantasy, that of Gwen—portrayed by Maggie Q—is played out almost entirely like a drama. These sequences lack any of the horror or thriller elements of the other fantasies and thus don’t fit well with other scenes.
Fantasy Island’s third act spirals into a series of twists. Without spoiling the film, these twists don’t make a whole lot of sense. They add more runtime to the film, making it seem incredibly bloated and feel much longer than it is. While the twists don’t necessarily break the continuity of the film, the decisions some characters make early on appear to make even less sense after the twists roll out.
The film’s look is mediocre. Some shots of the island are nice, but the cinematography throughout is hit or miss. One particular shot, where the camera rack focuses between the characters and black goop, is repeated over and over and looks worse with every iteration.
Fantasy Island functions much better as a comedy than as a horror film. While its comedic moments fail, the film is almost laughably bad thanks to the total incompetence demonstrated in the writing, acting and directing. Fantasy Island is a reminder that an interesting premise, like the fantasies it depicts, can backfire spectacularly.