On DVD: 7 Other Desert Islands You Could Try Getting Lost On

With the series' final season out now on DVD, you can't be blamed for having Lost fatigue, generally experienced as a repetitive weary squint and a growing intolerance for elaborate enigmas. But as escapist locales go, remote tropical islands never go out of fashion -- and so let's review some alternative getaways worth viewing at home:

1. The Black Stallion (1979)

Carroll Ballard's sweet take on the Walter Farley children's book is atmosphere-rich, light on unnecessary chitchat (the grand middle passage, set after a shipwreck on a desert island populated only by a boy and a wild horse, is essentially dialogue-free), and visually so beautiful it can stop your brain from working. (MGM Home Ent.)

2. Cast Away (2000)

A reflexive choice for most of us, if you're not tired of it, too. Only Tom Hanks could make almost two hours of stranded do's and don't's work like this. (Paramount)

3. Hell in the Pacific (1968)

A Boy's Own war game: Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune are American and Japanese soldiers stranded on a Pacific atoll during WWII, driving each other nuts (again, with very little dialogue) and acting out the war in miniature. John Boorman directed, and it's still a blast. (MGM Home Ent.)

4. The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

An utterly deranged adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel, starting out as a crazed Richard Stanley film and ending up a gun-for-hire John Frankenheimer freak. David Thewlis finds himself lost on an island where Marlon Brando is making people out of animals. Val Kilmer is around, doing God knows what, as Brando does song numbers with a micro-dwarf and the Hyena-Swine Man stages a revolution. Must be seen to be believed. (New Line Video)

5. Six Days Seven Nights (1998)

The movie feels longer than it is, but it may work for you if being trapped on a desert island with Anne Heche is your idea of a romcom. Heche and Harrison Ford were both, for different reasons, on the brink of post-stardom, and this film didn't help.

6. Crusoe (1988)

There are at least 25 movie versions of Defoe's book going back to the Theodore Roosevelt administration, but most are lost. This one might still the best, with Aidan Queen as the unlucky sailor, Black Stallion cinematographer Caleb Deschanel directing, and beaches provided by the Seychelles Islands, north of Madagascar. (Not on DVD, but available for on-demand rent or purchase from Amazon.)

7. Tabu (1931)

Fed up with the Hollywood studio system, German émigré director F.W. Murnau went to Tahiti with pioneering documentarian Robert Flaherty -- a match made in Hell -- to make a film. Flaherty left, Murnau lingered, and what remains is one of the last genuine silent films, with nary a title card. The upshot -- a simple, tragic native romance, filmed with locals and without a smidgen of Western condescension -- is a daydream of sun-blazed intimacy and, it should be said before all of this naturally toned nudity, the sexiest film made anywhere in the '30s. (Milestone)