emember how Peter Benchley wrote a couple of fairly successful novels imme- diately after Jaws, and both were made
into movies, one of which (1977’s The Deep) kicked off with five minutes of Jacqueline Bisset in a wet T-shirt? Yeah, well, this is the other one. The good news is that The Island (1980) doesn’t take a crash dive into tedium the way its prede- cessor does once the Bisset boobage is over; it may be an overambitious mess that bombed in theatres, but it’s big, loud, violent and gloriously silly, and hence of some interest to the Rue Morgue faithful. It’s also got Michael Caine as a journalist with appalling parenting skills, and a veritable dream team of 1970s character actors including David Warner (The Omen, Straw Dogs), Zakes Mokae (The Serpent and the Rainbow), Brad Sul- livan (Slap Shot) and Frank Middlemass (Barry Lyndon, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed and more BBC sitcoms than you could shake a banger at).
Caine’s character, reporter Blair Maynard, jumps
at the opportunity to cover a series of recent dis- appearances of various fishing charter boats and yachts in the northeastern Caribbean. Trouble is, he takes the assignment be- fore remembering he has cus- tody of his twelve-year-old son Justin (Jeffrey Frank) for the weekend. No matter – what could go wrong with the kid in tow? He appeases the under- standably cynical tween with a promise of a Disney World trip, then appeases him a bit more in Miami by buying him a handgun when the Disney World trip facade falls apart. (Hey, I told you there were some serious parenting issues here.) Soon enough, Maynard charters a cheap flight
to a nearby island on a cargo plane (“The sono- fabitch has propellors!” Justin laments) piloted by
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sweaty-faced Sullivan, whose indignity is com- pounded tenfold by Bermuda shorts and black knee socks. Upon reaching the obscure island, the three barely escape with their lives, after hitting the run- way without landing gear, and are subsequently in- formed by the local constable (Mokae) that there may not be another plane or boat out for several days. With time to kill, father and son borrow a small boat for a spot of fishing, but after attempting to rescue a would-be shipwreck victim, they’re overpowered by a bunch of really skanky pirates who have been living in almost complete isolation since their forebears put down roots in the area almost 300 years earlier. But instead of just killing their captives on the spot, the pirates hatch a plan that may help solve their inbreeding problem: they’ll brainwash Justin into becoming one of them, thereby introducing some badly needed fresh genes into their fetid gene
pool. They’ll know they’ve been successful when Justin murders his father. Turning the kid against Caine initially isn’t such a tall order, as he’s already pretty resentful, but will they be able to win him over completely? Stay tuned, me hearties. Speaking of which, there isn’t a single “Arr, matey!” or “Avast, ya swabs!” or “Bugger the
bosun’s mate!” to be had in this script, but the pi- rates do speak in some bizarre kind of patois that appears to be a mash up of 17th-century English and local dialects. Well, at least that’s how it sounds to my uneducated ear; I may be cunning, but I’m no linguist. In fairness, there are some decent one- liners elsewhere from various civilians. (First Act Cannon Fodder Guy: “You don’t send a proctologist to do a nose job.” Other First Act Cannon Fodder Guy: “Then you’d look like a real asshole.”) And these filthy, dentally devastated modern-day pirates probably bear a much closer resemblance to their ancestors than any found in would-be period pieces starring Johnny Depp or Errol Flynn. Detracting somewhat from this noble realism, however, we’ve got a climax involving a coast guard cutter manned by a crew of incompetent, pooch-screwing buf- foons, a bunch of pirates who are used to firing muskets and the occasional handgun suddenly be- coming proficient with military-issue automatic weapons, and then Caine himself, who levels the playing field by... naw, I ain’t goin’ there. Shout! Factory’s new DVD/Blu-ray reissue of The
Island certainly looks and sounds good, but aside from a few trailers and audio/subtitle options, there are no extras. As in NONE. A what? A scene index? Where’d you get that sense of entitlement? Oh, there, huh? Well, get the hell out of my basement and bring me back one, wouldja, ya scurvy dog?