Director: Adam Werth
Year: 2023
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Creature Feature
Plot:
After taking a special flight, a group of passengers and a dangerous criminal under police escort find their plane forced down on a strange island near the Bermuda Triangle where they find themselves hunted by a race of deformed humanoid creatures living on the island and must find a way to survive.
Review:
This was a pretty solid and overall enjoyable effort. One of the better elements of this one is the rather strong means of this one introducing life on the island offering the varying divisions within the group. As the whole concept of the group being stranded on the island and turning them into a differing set of ideals with the viewpoint of the camps essentially creating a type of survival competition between them, this comes off quite nicely here. That moves the second half along with some decent characterization work as the various teams getting split up offer a fine counterpoint as the first group stays together being the rational thinkers trying to keep themselves alive through cooperation against the other group who's more aggressive and determined. That is brought to bear quite a bit over the finale where it offers a couple of solid twists on everything to make for a generally fun setup.
That provides the film with a great series of attacks involving the creatures that have quite a bit to like here. Featuring highly impressive designs for the race of creatures with a spectacular humanoid look that goes well with a reptilian design and interface that comes with living on an island, this is a great setup that provides the launching point for the fun encounters here. Getting more of a fine swarming quality that shows the creatures coming out of the jungle to essentially rip out their intestines and dine on the remains with gruesome impact has a lot to like with the setup involved here which gets several fun encounters with them in the waterfall, the group attack on the beach or the big confrontation in the end that gets some rather fun with all the action mixed together. These factors all come together to give this one quite a lot to like.
There are some issues to be had with this one. One of the biggest flaws here is the inherent stupidity of taking a criminal onboard a flight like this which just screams as means of enticing chaos unnecessarily. The process is glossed over so hazily that there's not much in the way of logical reasoning for it to be included and is exposed even moreso when the plotline is dropped twenty minutes in before the storm hits so this whole point is incredibly underwhelming and unnecessary. As well, it's also quite hard to care about many of the characters here who are either annoying or stupid which makes it somewhat of a struggle to get behind them, either through obnoxious behavior or just plain bad decision-making that puts everyone in danger. A lot of that ends up causing the film to run longer than it should which is a bit distressing, which end up being the main drawbacks to this one.
Overview: ***.5/5
A highly enjoyable if slightly flawed genre effort, there's plenty to like here with this one as the few minor flaws don't really hold this one back as the positives here manage to be quite enjoyable. This is really recommended to fans of this kind of cheesy creature feature style or are fans of the creative crew's previous works, while most others that don't enjoy this kind of feature should heed caution.
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