Survival Island (2002)

A MUST BUY for insomniatic nights!!!! If I could give it a -1 I would. I was stuck between 2 of my favorite late night reruns and looking for something to kill an hour until my show came on. Came across this and thought I'd watch for a while. How bad could it be? I mean at the very least I get to watch attractive college chicks run around the jungle in skimpy clothing, there's worse ways I could spend my hour... boy was I wrong In recent years I had grown accustomed to watching late night awful movies, Sci-Fi originals mostly. I always felt that you couldn't get much worse than "Ice Spiders", though once again this movie proved me wrong.I was frequently annoyed by the fact that through the "Pinata Vision" (aka predator ripoff) it looks like this birthday toy was a meer steps behind the victim, yet when the camera reverts to a view of the victim coming at the camera, its no where in sight. The fact that the creature has the ability to fly but yet can't catch these people has me bewildered. It has a hatchet that it is god awfully inaccurate at throwing, but luckily it works like a boomerang and comes back. I also love how one guy gets riped in half (or so they say) but everyone else meerly gets stabed. Or how about the first girl that sees it, watches it kill the guy, then later thinks the guy is in the tent.........Long story short, other than the occasional laughable stupidity of an attempt to make a scary movie, the movie is dull and boring. I attempted to stay up and see how it ended, though I couldn't do it. I fell asleep and missed my show. I might go buy the movie, simply for those insomniac moments.

OK, Let's get this over with, this film is not Halloween, Friday the thirteenth or even the latest Leprechaun movie. This film is cliché to the max. A bunch of teenagers on a deserted island are being killed by a monster. You don't get more cliché than that. The film is at it's best tacky and it's worst plain bad. HOWEVER there is a beacon of hope for this movie. Like Plan 9 and Xanadu this movie is so damn awful that it's fun to watch. You can tell that the actors didn't take the movie seriously and that the special effects were phoned in, but that's part of the charm. It is definitely a cult film that a few select people will enjoy, Plus it's the only film in the world that can boast about having Pinata Vision. Go see it if you get a chance, just don't expect perfection.

A group of college students goes to an island to party with tequila and underpants on Cinco de Mayo. But when two of them find an old pinata washed up on shore and break open the shell, they find it contains more than candy and child-friendly goodies: it has the evil spirits of an ancient tribe! The same night I watched this on DVD, two of my friends saw it on American Movie Classics (of all places) after a night of drunkenly revelry at the bar. My friend Kenn asks, "Why was AMC showing this crap? It was good for a laugh when you come home from the bar and flip it on, though." And my friend Nick concurs that "it totally sucked but as Kenn said it was funny after the bar grocery store run." I think this is the nicest thing you can ever say about "Demon Island" (which I saw as "Pinata: Survival Island").The cast was respectable (one guy from "Sabrina", one from "Buffy" and Jaime Pressly at her most annoying). But the decent cast didn't make this film any more bearable. And I can't blame them -- they did a fine job, and even the writers can't be blamed because the plot was good enough for a cheap horror film.The blame must be placed completely on the directors. First, there was the awful "pinata vision". I have yet to find a film that uses the "killer vision" feature without it looking cheap. I can accept "killer cam", but not some actual weird coloring to show what they would see like. Do I need to know that the pinata sees through some distorted ruby goggles? No.But moreover, the biggest issue was the use of the computer effects. They looked like crap. Complete crap. The pinata kept changing shape and size, and all these looked like crap. I have heard the directors didn't like the midget in the rubber suit. Well, the scenes with the midget in the rubber suit at least made sense -- he looked like the pinata rather than some weird shape-shifting thing. And it would have helped the continuity, since the giant pinata suddenly got very small when they needed him to. What the heck? So that's my beef -- a cheap plot with some of the worst effects just in my face for an hour. The best part of this film, as others have noted, is the first ten minutes with the flashback to the natives. I think this was done beautifully. But it isn't good enough to even make up for ten minutes of the later crap I had to watch. Can I say crap one more time? Because it was crap.Don't buy this, don't rent this, don't watch it on AMC. In fact ,if you were unlucky enough to catch it on AMC, send them an e-mail and tell them how much you hate them for wasting your time with this rubbish. Because when I want to see movie classics, I wan to see something that isn't only five years old and worth less than one of my kidney stones.

or whatever they make movies out of these days. One of the worst movies I've ever seen. I grew up in the late 1960's- early 1970's and enjoyed Ray Harryhausen special effects thirty years ago. People are now wasting money to produce these god-awful sci-fi channel movies that are ruining the appeal of the science fiction genre. "Pinata" is simply a terrible waste and it is not a movie that is so bad it's good or funny. It's just an insult. Either that, or intended for kids under age three. The special effects are juvenile and there was no effort to produce a quality product. That's what is so bad about these sci-fi channel, straight to DVD movies. They are just cranking out more quantity with very low quality. This drags down the entire genre. These movies will not be watched in 30-40 years from now like we watch classic horror movies now. Movies like "Pinata" just go straight to the dumpster where they belong. Another hour and a half wasted.