The premise of this intrigued me so much, I was ready to prioritize it for a couple weekends ago. Except for some unknown reason, there were no Thursday night preview screenings, and I couldn’t make it any other day that weekend. Then the first reviews started coming out, and it made sense why there were no word of mouth screenings–the word of mouth was terrible. I de-prioritized it for the following weekend. However, I was still curious. The next weekend, I was pretty booked up, and wasn’t even considering squeezing this in. But then I ended up systematically downsizing my weekend plans cause I just wasn’t up for doing much, and I realized this movie was still a possibility. Hooray? Sure.
In a loose re-imagining of the classic TV series, a group of lucky travelers are granted a stay at Fantasy Island, where their most secret desires and fantasies will come to life. However, fantasies don’t always play out how you’d expect, often to deadly consequences. And seeing as how this is brought to us by Blumhouse, very deadly indeed.
I’m not gonna say this was a good movie. The reviews coming in weren’t wrong. The story is rather ludicrous and full of plot holes and absurdities and things that should not work. And yet I was very entertained. There was a mystery around the whole thing. How did the island know their fantasies? How do these fantasies play out? What brought these people to the island? What’s really going on? I’m a sucker for a good mystery and I was sucked right in. It was very similar to some of the reasons I love the Saw franchise, but on a much lower level of quality. Instead of wanting to know their sins and the games, I wanted to know their past and their fantasy. And there wasn’t as much gore as Saw either, by a long shot.
It also had great tie ins to Fantasy Island, at least ones that I identified after reading up on the series’ Wikipedia article. Although I think waaaay too many people said “The Plane! The Plane!” I think this was a great concept and a fun film, just poorly executed. Some more thought into the writing would have gone a long way. I still enjoyed it, but I get why most others didn’t
Fantasy Island – \m/ \m/ \m/