(Spoiler?) For a minute, actually for about twenty-or-thirty-minutes, I thought I had lucked onto a straight-to-video horror gem. The opening titles told an intriguing, supposedly true, tale of an island in the New York harbor where countless thousands of the city's unidentified and indigent dead have been buried for decades. Cool. The opening was sufficiently eerie and atmospheric. I liked the cinematography, the music, and the setting. Piles of plain, plywood coffins in the morgue awaiting shipment to the island. Scary. Open mass graves on the sandy island. So far so good. The main characters were established quickly and cleanly. Talisa Soto was well-suited for the role of the compassionate missing persons detective. Bruce Ramsay was good as the innocent prisoner stuck on burial detail. The filmmakers even spent some money to get a "name," Malcolm McDowell, to play the Trump-style developer intent on developing the island. They had all the pieces in place for a fun movie except a monster. What do the filmmakers give us? Swarms of flies. That's right. Tens of thousands of corpses on the island and they give us murderous, vaguely supernatural flies. The flies, somehow, some way, seem to realize that McDowell is going to develop the island and they single him out for destruction. (The flies also kill a few other people, probably because they knew the film would be too short if they went straight for McDowell.) These are smart flies. In fact, they're probably so smart that had they written the script, they would have given the audience what it expected: Zombies. Alfred Hitchcock used to say, and I paraphrase, the stronger the villain, the stronger the movie. You do the math.
Review of Island of the Dead
