| "Pirates
of Ghost Island" DVD
With the highly, highly
successful conclusion of "Pirates of the Caribbean"
still fresh in everyone's minds, it's not so outlandish to think
that the "me, too!" crowd has crawled out of the woodwork.
Imitators are a mixed
bag, as always, with some skillful imitators at work as well as
some scavengers out for a quick buck also at play. "Pirates
of Ghost Island", fresh off the boat from Lions Gate, will
prove to be one of the scavengers.
And what "Pirates
of Ghost Island" digs up is the story of half a dozen kids
shipwrecked on an island following a sudden storm. The island
only looks uninhabited, because the next morning, one of them
is kidnapped. And thus, the kidnapping leads the remainder into
a fight for their lives against the titular pirates of what is,
apparently, now Ghost Island, formerly Fishkill Island.
"Pirates of Ghost
Island" screams, at once, "low-budget" and "shoddily
executed". How? Why, just follow the pirates down their cave
on the island when, in 1685, they invented tiki torches. That's
right--the "pirate cave" is lit with remnants from a
lawn and garden store. For crying out loud, people...this isn't
rocket science! You want to make torches for a pirate movie, you
make them yourself! You don't run down to Menard's or K-Mart or
some such and clear out the tiki torches!
This is not a barbecue!
This is not a garden party! This is a fucking pirate movie! Show
some authenticity, for crying out loud!
And it only gets cheesier
the farther in you go. I mean, I've got something of an appreciation
for low-budget filmmaking. Some of the best movies I've ever seen
were shot on the strength of someone's credit card. But still...for
crying out loud, there's low-budget and then there's just downright
godawful. "Pirates of Ghost Island" qualifies as downright
godawful. The acting has more wood in it than a pirate galleon
and the script has more holes than same. The effects are limited
to blood and the occasional bit of shimmering blue light to represent
ghosts.
I'm not up on my editing
techniques, but when they're using wipe effects to advance the
footage, I know something pathologically low-budget is going on.
That and the movie
is also very, very dialogue-heavy. You're spending most of the
movie, as a result, watching people talk. That's not exactly entertaining
by itself, and with the rest of the problems this movie's got,
it just drags it down even further.
Oh, and let's not forget
the sheer logical impossibilities, like when the search party
goes into the woods and runs into a "native" with a
blowgun. The native makes one shot--it's audible that one puff
goes into the blowgun--but somehow, the target takes no less than
FIVE DARTS TO THE FACE. So unless that's a shotblowgun, somebody
really screwed the pooch.
Then, as a final blow
to my sensibilities, the characters actually have catch phrases.
One starts most of his sentences with "fact is". Dawn,
the tall blonde with the accent who spends the entire movie in
a red bikini, says "I just wish we could go home" at
least four times. I'd say something snarky about that but there's
really no point. It's just thoroughly stupid and anyone who watches
this will know that anyway. So why bring it up?
The ending is pretty
shoddy, but at least manages to not leave too many loose ends.
Mostly because the rest of the movie didn't advance a whole lot
of plot that had to be tied up later anyway. It's not too hard
to put a decent ending on a movie that was pretty much garbage
to begin with. The fact that the evil pirate captain was actually
defeated by...get this...talking him into giving up is a downright
tragedy from a narrative standpoint. The twist is equally shoddy,
and the credits roll with what sounds like a karaoke version of
"Fifteen Men on a Dead Man's Chest".
The special features
are limited to Spanish and English subtitles, along with trailers
for "Acts of Death", "Haunted Boat", "Cross
Bones", and "Komodo Vs. Cobra".
All in all, "Pirates
of Ghost Island" is a slow, waterlogged wreck of a movie
that proves to be one of the worst pirate movies I've ever seen.
Slow, dull, and poorly executed, this scurvy dog is no treasure.
Pirates
of Ghost Island
*
DVD
Directed by Mitcheal Toles
Writen by Kristen J. Johnson, Pauline Thomas
Starring Melissa Powell, William Landsman, Thomas Stiver, Jennifer
Casco
Produced by David Sterling
80 mins
R
2007
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