Island of the Dead (2000)

McDowell has certainly come a long way since A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and CALIGULA. Here, he owns an island chocked with the graves of nameless souls who bit it in the Big Apple and have now turned into swarms of digital dots. The cast beats their heads frantically, but there's no getting away from the nits. Malcolm can't escape this, either. Playing a billionaire businessman, the old Brit seems rather like a loopy immigrant among a cast of Anglo blahs. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out - bring your swatters, it's an inexpensive special effects treat for anyone who keeps lizards or birds as pets. The flies are wide open on this low budget buzzer.

Island of the Dead is not on the list of the worst movies ever made, as it's too innocuous to be offensively bad. However, I can honestly recall few films which have bored me as much.A millionaire (Malcolm McDowell), a couple of cops and three convicts are trapped on Hart Island, where deadly insects are spreading a disease. Every time a character dies we see him gesturing excessively, usually from afar, as he is attacked by insects. After a couple of seconds he gets sick, then dies and quickly decomposes. Everyone else worriedly contemplates the aftermath. Repeat.A slow build-up is usually a sound approach in horror movies, but when things move slowly there must be SOMETHING to capture the viewers' interest - a compelling premise, luscious visuals, crisp writing, strong performances, an impending sense of dread. Island of the Dead has nothing of this. Just flies. And people gesturing excessively. Again. And again.Worth mentioning is a surreal sequence filmed in slow-motion, with an absurdly out of place "Yo-ho! Yo-ho!" song as the main characters pose for the camera; a bizarrely kitsch, creatively ugly note in a mire of tedium.2/10

A bunch of people--including evil industrialist Malcolm McDowell, policewoman Talisa Soto and prisoner Bruce Ramsay--are on Hart Island--an actual island off the coast of NYC where unidentified dead people are buried. While there they desecrate one of the graves. You would expect by the title that the dead would come to life and attack. Wrong! They instead are attacked by...flies. If the flies bite you, you die and almost immediately begin decomposing.This sounded pretty promising--not in a good way but a bad camp movie sort of way. Unfortunately this is just bad. The soundtrack has annoying rap songs which don't even fit the movie; the dialogue and characters are all clichés that you've seen and heard before; the fly POV shots are hysterical; in one shot it's daytime--a minute later it's pitch black night (shades of Ed Wood Jr.!); lousy makeup and boring CGI effects and a stubborn refusal to be scary even once! I was so bored I dozed off for about 10 minutes (I didn't miss anything). It really boggles the mind that anyone would think this would ever work.Some good performances make this bearable--Soto is beautiful but wooden however Ramsay is surprisingly good and McDowell is just great--he's obviously enjoying himself and his enjoyment rubs off (a little). Still this is a stupid, dumb, boring and completely illogical horror film. Right down there with "House of the Dead". A must miss.

**SPOILERS** Sargeant Melissa O'Keefe,Talisa Soto,of the NYPD Missing Person Bureau sets out for Hart Island with a burial unit of convicts to find and identify a young girl. The girl is believed to have be buried on the island's Potters Field and Melissa, who was abundant as an infant herself, has this strong identification with missing persons. Melissa wants at least to have them identified, when found, so that she can put their friends and relatives to rest by not wondering if their alive or dead. At the island there's a ground-breaking ceremony for a low-rent housing project, Hope City, with the city's mayor and multi-billionaire real estate tycoon Rupert King, Malclom McDowell. The hosing development is being built to keep the riff-raft off the city streets and hide them away there from the public for strictly "humanitariam" purposes. The fact is that King has other purposes for bringing the city's unwanted there and it's for him getting rich by using them as experiments for the pharmaceutical companies that he owns. You have to have a real strong stomach to sit through this film with people getting attacked by these super flies who not only infect them with their eggs but who cause their victims to burst open and decompose within minutes. The grossed out scenes in the film have countless maggots crawling out of the infected peoples corpses. The mad and arrogant King had been planing to do this for years by using Hart Island as a laboratory and the use poor and unwanted as guinea pigs. Now with him in trouble financially, he had six major failures in a row, this project The Hope City Devlopment will put him back on top but the over one million bodies buried in Potters Field have other ideas for King and their not very pleasant. It's too bad that almost everyone on Hart Island gets eaten from the inside out by the fly hatching maggots with the person that they were really after Rupert King getting his at the very end. Even though the movie was anything but rational and coherent,especially after some thirty minutes into it, it did for a time hold your interests. The cast also did a much better job then the flimsy material that they were saddled with. There was also the very effective and eerie atmospherics of the spooky Hart Island and Potters field that at times made your flesh crawl. But the plot fell apart with the flies becoming more and more unbelievable as they just seemed to come and go, as if they were out to lunch. Making it possible for those on the island to predict just when it was safe to go outside and eventually escape by boat.One of the most ridicules scenes I've ever seen in a movie is when King is attacked by millions of killer flies and to keep them away from him he blasts away at them with his handgun.