Reimagining a late 70's/early 80's television series about guests who travel to a mysterious remote island to live out their fantasies as a supernatural horror movie is a pretty clever idea. Countless stories have told audiences that wishes don't usually end well, so why not turn one of the few pieces of art where happily ever after's were the norm into something sinister? While the wishes do indeed go poorly for the guests in the Jason Blum-produced version of Fantasy Island, sadly the movie itself does too.
Fantasy Island falls into the dreaded no man's land of teen horror flicks. It's far too inept from a writing and generating scares standpoint to work as an effective genre piece yet is just intriguing enough to not be a completely laughable stinker. There's some semblance of dumb fun to be had trying to piece together the jumbled mystery plot that features nonsensical, unexplained mythology galore, some awkward tonal shifts, a bizarre sense of restraint following its more absurd revelations and a couple of charismatic presences (Jimmy O. Yang, Michael Pena) in an otherwise stiff ensemble cast (Lucy Hale and Austin Stowell in particular might want to get their pulses checked to confirm that they are indeed still alive) prevent Fantasy Island from ever achieving the high level of unintentional hilarity that it flirts with throughout. With cult classic status off the table, what's left is a harmlessly bad early year entry into the horror movie pool that will be easy to forget. It's a real shame that this was so close to being another unapologetically kooky aquatic winter classic a la Serenity, and I'll be holding this oddly specific strain of failure against Jeff Wadlow, Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach for the rest of their careers.
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