As you read this, audiences are going to be of, um, two minds about Shutter Island. Is Martin Scorsese's thriller a rollicking example of an A-list filmmaker having fun with B-movie conventions? Or is it a bloated waste of time and talent that hinges on a switcheroo we could see coming back when Engor met Oomo? Either way, there's no doubt that you can do a lot worse with island-set schlock. I know, I've visited those grim shores -- read on for a guided tour.
9. The Island (2005)
It's odd that Michael Bay's film is about escaping to The Island. That's because the boffin-facility we begin in is a clean, wholly artificial and super-stylized space -- populated by cloned hotties like Ewan Macgregor and Scarlett Johannson, and dotted with sexy product placements for Apple, Puma, Xbox and Speedo -- seems like the auteur's idea of heaven. But keeping the action confined to this serene pleasure dome would have robbed Bay of the chance to stage the CGI-and-testosterone-fueled race-and-chase that makes up the film's second half. Even compared with Pearl Harbor, this came off poorly, but it now shines pretty brightly beside the cinematic black hole that was Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen. Fittingly enough, given the subject matter, The Island was recycled without credit from 1979 movie The Clonus Horror, a little cinematic cloning that in 2007 cost DreamWorks a settlement reportedly worth seven figures.
8. Frankenstein Island (1981)
For his last film, Z-grade auteur Jerry Warren simply recycled themes and cast members he'd used in previous masterworks such as The Incredible Petrified World (explorers chasing a world record), Teenage Zombies (an army of mind-slaves controlled by actress Katherine Victor) and Creature Of The Walking Dead (mad scientist blood experiments). The film -- about hot-air ballooning hunks washed up on an island populated by primitive babes, a zombie army and a couple of mad scientists -- is a piece of schlock to rival the likes of Plan 9 From Outer Space for entertaining incoherence. See John Carradine as a disembodied ghost head as he rants about The Golden Thread! Swoon as sexy alien-hybrid cave women smoke skull bongs! Thrill to the sight of giant vegetables! Recoil at wrestling zombies dressed like the Unabomber! To be fair, Lost doesn't make any more sense -- and takes 100 times as long to wade through. This awaits rediscovery as an object of midnight cult veneration.
7. Australia (2008)
As a citizen of Down Under, I can say with true-blue, dinky-di bloody confidence that while we Aussies have a robust sense of humor about ourselves, we weren't especially taken with a) Baz Luhrmann directing this; b) him giving his pastiche of classic Hollywood the unassuming title of Australia; and, c) using as a centerpiece for his melodrama the WWII surprise attack that's our equivalent of Pearl Harbor. It'd be like, say, Garry Marshall making a movie about 9/11 and calling it America. Baz's big-budget spectacular pretty much lived down to our expectations. The catch-all camp-kitsch aesthetic was mildly amusing when sending up Hugh Jackman's studliness and Nicole Kidman's prim British marm but, to use a bit of Aussie slang, Baz's approach went down like a fart in mass when applied to "magical" Aborigines or when it reduced the tragic bombing of Darwin to little more than a backdrop to our lovers' reconciliation.
6. House Of The Dead (2003)
After his passable English-language debut in 2002 supernatural thriller Blackwoods, German director Uwe Boll established his infamy among fanboys with this diabolical video game adaptation. The plot has it that a bunch of club kids hire Jurgen Prochnow and Clint Howard to take 'em to an island rave. Turns out, the party's already over -- thanks not to bad ecstasy but to the zombie-fying immortality experiments of a crackpot Spanish mad scientist! All that's left is for our gang of acting-challenged douches and douchettes to attempt line-readings as they blow the heads off the undead hordes. To spruce things right up, Boll includes actual first-person shooter footage from the video game. Amazingly enough, it wasn't Game Over for Boll after this.
5. Swept Away (2002)
Madonna and then-hubby Guy Ritchie's remake of the 1974 Italian original came across like a vanity project engineered by a couple not aware of their secret self-loathing and mutual antipathy. In Amber, the toxically narcissistic billionaire harpy floating around the Mediterranean with her equally loathsome asshole buddies, Madonna at least found a role that seemed to suit her. Her belittling of her boat's lowly crewmate Giuseppe, whose working-class loins she lusts after, also didn't seem much of a stretch. Pity then that after these two are washed ashore and go through the requisite hate-to-love routine, Madonna's character softens and her believable performance softens into smoochy moments whose sincerity is rivaled by the work done by bits of driftwood in the corner of the frame. Ritchie does his missus no favors, staging the supposedly sexy scenes like a parody of a shampoo ad, and frequently bathing his inamorata in magic-hour grading so she looks like an over-pumped and possibly hepatic supporting player on The Simpsons.
4. Return To The Blue Lagoon (1991)
No-one demanded it and Brooke Shields, Christopher Atkins and director Randall Kleiser refused to be again washed up on its shores. But that didn't stop director William A. Graham, whose career had previously focused on TV movies about the likes of Mussolini, Jim Jones and Howard Hughes, from enlisting teens Milla Jovovich and Brian Krause in another queasy plot involving pseudo-siblings' slow but inevitable graduation to steamy lovin'. At least they have the decency to stage a beach wedding before giving in to their desires, which are realized in soft-core PG-13 porn that, laughably, includes cut-away shots to fishing.
3. Empire Of The Ants (1977)
Bert I. Gordon made his career with 1950s creature features about giant spiders, locusts and mutant men in nappies terrorizing the mid-west. In the 1970s, with Jaws and King Kong having done, er, sizable box-office business, he took another stab at the big bug genre. This one has Joan Collins as a bitchy developer trying to dupe investors into buying into her worthless island property. But radioactive waste washing up on the shore does more than devalue the beachfront. It supersizes the ant population -- and these insects don't just want to munch on the swinging 1970s types, they want to use the Queen's pheromones to enslave them at the old sugar factory!
2. The Wild Women Of Wongo (1958)
This is set 10,000 years ago when Mother Nature and Father Time conducted an experiment in which all the men on the island of Goona were made handsome while their women were made ugly. On the neighboring isle of Wonga, the reverse was made true. Our tale concerns the forbidden love between Goona's hunk Engor and Wonga's honey Oomo, and the various threats to their beautiful-people union posed by alligators, ape men and, of course, the hideous butt-ugly people of their or any world. Meant as a comedy, it's thoroughly stupid, but also strangely watchable and offers some crazy head-banging from the girls during their tripped-out dance to the Dragon God. That it ends up with the slinky folk canoodling while the monobrowed freaks are lumped together makes this a strangely accurate depiction of A-list celebrity mating habits. I also think it's not a bad concept for a reality-TV show.
1. The Ghastly Ones (1968)
Andy Milligan was a real island auteur -- the writer-director-producer-costumer made most of his cheap-and-nasty grindhouse flicks in his house on Staten Island in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Ghastly Ones is, like most of this misanthrope's work, technically awful but exerts the sort of deadly mesmerism as a rattlesnake on your path. Exploring his usual themes -- mother hatred, incest, murder and madness -- this has three sisters only able to inherit daddy's fortune if they can spend three days in "sexual harmony" with their spouses at the familial mansion, which has never known love. Cue a series of hate-filled revelations and murders that'd be gruesome if not for the sickly, out-of-focus "swirl cam" that became Milligan's trademark. Watch this, even on DVD, and you can almost smell the grime of 42nd Street in its hellish heyday.
Check out Michael Adams' pop-culture memoir Showgirls, Teen Wolves, And Astro Zombies (It! Books), which traces his obsessive year-long quest to find the worst movie ever made. It's but a click away!