Monster Island is a phenomenally frustrating movie. Because it could have just been phenomenal.
As you might have guessed from my last post, I have been in the mood for a good ol’ creature feature – and Monster Island, which had its streaming release last month, seemed to be a good new creature feature to scratch that very itch. Mike Wiluan’s 1942 period piece monster movie ticks so many of the boxes that I love about this particular side of the genre – a cheerful B-movie aesthetic, a gorgeous backdrop, a compelling premise that casts an English and Japanese soldier as reluctant allies against a mysterious creature after finding themselves shipwrecked together on an island.
And, scattered across Monster Island, there are a generous handful of great moments, ideas, and story beats – glimpses of what the movie could have been. But what we actually ended up with is a severely uneven and overwritten feature that struggles to make it to the 90-minute mark, and makes you feel that every step of the way.
The actual monster of the title, the Orang Ikan, scratches a B-movie itch for me – it really is just a guy in an intricate bug-eyed suit, and Monster Island’s best moments come when we get to see the Orang Ikan interact with the environment around them. Using its interactions with the surrounding ecosystem to establish its ability and place in this world, the actual Orang Ikan itself could have served as the villain for an interesting story – if the bloated script didn’t drop the ball as badly as it did.
Leading men Dean Fujioka and Callum Woodhouse have solid chemistry, and their enemies-to-reluctant-allies-to-friends arc shows flashes of genuine brilliance – the film has a scattering of smaller moments between them that serve as a glimpse of what could have been if this script had just been combed over a few more times, and I wish we could have seen that version of it (and the version where Callum Woodhouse’s Bronson didn’t sound like he had been plucked straight from a modern American action movie half the time, but hey, you can’t win them all). What we end up with, though, is a strangely compacted storyline that relies on insisting on their relationship rather than demonstrating it, using shorthand when it has all the time in the world to get into things on a more meaningful level.
And on that note, the script at large feels like something that’s been desperately fluffed-up from a really great short film into a bloated drag that strains to make it to a scant eighty minutes. The final scenes are basically a collection of flashbacks to stuff we saw not less than an hour ago, blatant in its attempt to heave itself over the feature film line.
The sagging pace had me wondering, by the time the credits rolled, just how brilliant this movie could have been if it had been nothing more than a lean half-hour short, but instead, what we got is an overlong, wasteful, and ultimately frustrating trudge. Looks like I’ll be sticking to creature features of years past for a little longer.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Bloody Disgusting)
No But Listen 