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Baddie – Once again, horny teenagers.

Lesson – Twists are not the answer.

As you may or may not know, a lot of the movies I watch for this blog come from Netflix. Some of them sit in my Instant Queue for a long time. This is one of those movies.

“Fear Island” is unique in a few ways. One is that is starts with the capture of the survivor, which, for me, takes the fun out. Now I know who lives. And who dies. And guess what. The one who lives? It’s Haylie Duff. The rest of the movie takes place half in interrogation, half in flashbacks, as everyone assumes that Jenna (Haylie) has killed everyone else.

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A few things happen in this movie that are typical, like, horny teenagers vacation on an island (less tropical, more Maine style) and are drinking, galavanting, etc. Then a few things happen that are rather…un-typical. For one, the main douchey character actually passes on one of the girls mid-make out when he finds out she’s underage (although this gets creepier later). Then the weirdness starts with randomly placed blood. There’s a creepy guy, but he just takes care of the lost chihuahua. The most un-typical thing is that Haylie Duff is…well she’s kind of not a bad actress. Actually, solid performances all around, working against a slightly underwhelming script.

Here’s a thing. This movie? It was…it was pretty darn enjoyable. It’s not without its flaws, like, there’s a ‘toy’ bit with a small monkey, and it’s very serial-killer indicative, but it doesn’t really make a difference. The killer does write words on or near his victims, and that was a nice touch. The killings are sort of unique, too. Lures, little things to mess around with the kids. A tree explodes into flame. Someone gets shot with a nail gun, and not in a ridiculous Evil Dead sort of way. SURPRISE SNAKE.

That being said, the plot is pretty loosey goosey. As I mentioned before, the script sort of works against the interesting parts, and overall it wasn’t a great twist. The revenge plot is actually super dumb and really unnecessary. The twist within the twist was predictable, so basically the twist was that the twist wasn’t the twist and the audience was right the whole time. Fantastic.

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Ugh. Another twist?

Now, this whole thing is better if you remember it’s Canadian. The killer kindly leaves notes letting everyone knows why they were killed. This is better than my first Canadian horror movie, Grizzly Rage in that the kids curse and stuff. There is, however, still a bear trap.

My initial interest in this movie stemmed from the stellar list of cast. Haylie Duff, Aaron Ashmore and Kyle Schmid – ranging from the ‘I know her from the 90’s’, ‘I know his twin brother (Shawn Ashmore!)’ and ‘Looks vaguely familiar from previews’. Although actually, I watch ‘Warehouse 13’ and that’s Aaron Ashmore and I love him.

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