Fear Island (2009)

Why so much hype?

just watch it!

Brilliant and touching

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

An exciting little whodunit with a twist ending. It has the four teenagers going to a cabin stereotype, the suspense of a slowly unraveling mystery.

Six friends ( plus a stowaway) go on a weekend getaway to a deserted island and find themselves at the mercy of a killer. The question is who is the killer? The premise is hardly original but then how many films are these days. The film is shown in flashback which to be honest I found a little irritating at the start but in the end I felt it worked. The characters/victims are the normal cannon fodder you would expect to find in a movie like this and at times it all feels a little predictable and I felt I'd seen some scenes before even though I hadn't. There is a lack of gore in the film although there are a number of good tense scenes and some wince inducing moments. For all it's obvious flaws there are enough nice touches to keep up your interest level and it has a nice twist ending. Although it's certainly no ground breaker it's an easy film to watch which makes it ideal for a Saturday night with a few beers. Overall I enjoyed this film and it's worth watching on the basis that you don't expect too much.

Sometimes you watch something in desperation. Sometimes on a friend's recommendation, figuring its worth a watch. It is! FEAR ISLAND is a movie that proves there are endless ways to meet your demise. A handful of friends, and a stowaway, head to a family cabin on a secluded island for a getaway of partying. Brothers Tyler(Kyle Schmid)and Kyle(Jacob Blair) had no idea their hospitality would be marred by the discovery of a dead body. Then when they try to go for help, their boat has disappeared from the dock. Now the story falls in line with so many other slasher flicks; everyone on the island are in startled fear of a mysterious killer. One by one the friends meet their deaths in various and imaginative manner. A lone survivor(Haylie Duff)tries to retell the gory chain of events to Detective Armory(Martin Cummins) and a therapist, Dr. Chalice(Ann Marie DeLuise). Personally my interest was in the stowaway, Megan(Lucy Hale). Now you have to figure out who the killer was and why. Wait for it, there is a twist of course. Filmed totally in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on a modest budget. Others in the cast: Jessica Harmon, Jim Thorburn and Brenda O'Brien.

The other Duff sister gets her own slasher vehicle, a real dud with a twist you can see coming a mile away. A group of hot-looking college kids decide to yacht to a nice island retreat for some partying which turns sour really quickly when a killer, with a reason for his/her vengeance, ruins the festivities, murdering them one by one, leaving "clues" as to why each member is a victim, words in white paint, like INNOCENT and GUILTY. It all could be the result of a cruel sex prank played on an attractive but unpopular nobody in their school who went missing shortly afterward. The movie goes back and forth between a detective and psychologist questioning amnesia-stricken Hayley Duff and her reports (as they return to her supposedly in fragments told in jarring flashbacks) and the events that supposedly transpired during the death weekend on Fear Island. The movie pretty much casts doubt on Duff immediately because Haley isn't much of an actress who can play a tragic victim that convincingly or maybe it was the poor direction which never allows us to believe she is telling us the whole truth. I rarely believed much of anything the flashbacks were telling me and the psychologist, who seems to be on her side at first, while the detective is hard-nose-to-the-grindstone with her at the onset soon thinks she might be a victim instead of killer (which tells you how stupid his character is as I'm no detective and Duff practically has guilty stamped on her forehead due to her fishy, suspicious performance), denounces large pieces of her fractured testimony as not wholly matching the evidence recovered at the crime scene. Yet, this slasher film expects us to swallow the conclusion where the psychologist, who has reservations about Duff's innocence, actually accepts a drink from her before the parents are about to arrive, just proving that someone who is skilled at reading behavior doesn't seem so smart when it matters most. The scenes on the island are of the tiresome PG-13 variety, with characters right out of a I Know What You Did Last Summer sequel. None of the kill-scenes will leave you very overwhelmed..a rattlesnake bite to the chest is really as gory as it gets as most of the deaths are of the off-screen variety. Boring, with zero thrills, "Fear Island" will induce heavy snoring.