DVD Dark Island

The Altracorp Corporation uses the Mare island as testing ground of biological weapons, but the research team loses control of the experiments and disappears. A rescue team formed by Raymond Hua (Zero Kazama), Rachel Gant (Mary Christina Brown), Doctor Sophie Miller (Victoria Floro), Allen (Rob O'Brien) and Will Cain (Jai Koutrae) depart from Stillwater, British Columbia, to the island. When they arrive, they find one survivor, Mitchell (Eric Raymond Lim), infected by the experiment and a deadly black smoke has been unleashed threatening them. When they return to the beach, they find that their vessel has disappeared and they are trapped in the remote island.

"Dark Island" is another terrible movie of "island of experiments of an evil military corporation". The unoriginal screenplay uses the black smoke from "Lost'; black eyes from "Supernatural"; a collection of clichés with ridiculous plot points; and an awful and amateurish ham acting. The cast might have been chosen in a cinema school, highlighting the speech of the uncredited guy that performs Will's superior in the army. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "Ilha das Sombras" ("Island of the Darkness")

Criticism is something that a lot of people find it hard to both explain and deal with and there are some who just ignore it all together, as such Dark Island is one of those many low budget action/horror movies that has so far had received very negative reception from critics, but from the film company's point of view they probably do not care as long as the film sells well enough to make money. Dark Island copies the many successful franchises like the Lost and Resident Evil series by putting them together with a cast of unknown actors and first time directors on some Canadian island.

Why is this film bad? The first question should be what isn't bad? Well it's not the low budget, as some low budget horror films have succeed both financially and critically like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. It's not the special effects which I think are some of the best special effects I have ever seen on a low budget movie, the detail on the black fog monsters is very good but I personally think CGI means very little when judging how good a film is, and I hate those Avatar lovers who only think Avatar is good because of its state of the art computer generated imagery.

The acting is only decent at best, just by watching the film you can tell that the actors are trying so hard to play the roles of their characters to make their acting as realistic as possible, the acting does not suck but they could at least be more relaxed about it.

Now for the answer to the question, why is this movie bad? Well it's the story, editing and script (if they even used a script and storyboards) the story is just plain bad from the start to finished and it has been done many, many times before it in far better ways. A group of people from different backgrounds are sent to a secret island that is run by Altracorp an evil corporation that specializes in developing biological weapons for the military, the same as the Umbrella corporation from the Resident Evil series, each character is not who they seem and they all have their own flashback sequence like in the Lost TV series, the story also has a twist ending which is not really worth waiting for, as I watch the film I feel as though the film's target audience was a dumb, uneducated audience. Now that's the story covered, another bad thing about the film is its action sequences which are very poorly edited and badly produced, they are often very cheesy and are not real enough to be taken seriously.

I will not be recommending Dark Island to anyone wanting to see an action sci-fi movie. It's not the worst movie I have ever seen but it does add to my top 10 worst movies I have ever seen list and while its special effects did save it from a 1/10 rating I still dislike this film and hope that this review will save you from both renting or buying this movie, it does not deserve your hard earned money.

3/10