'THE ISLAND'.........BENCHLEY'S INBRED AND BREAKFAST.....

The Island (1980).....on the surface, sounded like a surefire summer hit from the "Jaws" production team, another sea-going adventure from writer Peter Benchley and producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown.....with an irresistible gimmick: the discovery of the descendants of Caribbean pirates, still plundering, pillaging and raping just like the good old days.....

                 The film itself showed up dead on arrival, a sour, grim ugly affair.....it swung wildly from horror(the opening sequences of hapless wealthy pleasure boaters butchered by the pirates) to half baked satire (the pirate chief (David Warner) and his gang resembling Peter Pan and his Lost Boys if they'd all grown up to become sadistic, psychotic inbred ghouls...)

                  Director Michael Ritichie had already made his mark as something of a clever social satirist ("The Candidate", "The Bad News Bears", "Smile"), but Benchley's skimpy, ludicrous screenplay clearly confounded him as how to approach it.  So he tried everything......low comedy. child torture, a dark spoof of swashbuckling......and lastly, when he d completely run out of ideas, lavish Peckinpah bloodbaths.....

                  Sloppily paced, there isn't a minute of it that's remotely believable, so you have plenty of time to ponder every incredulous scene. An investigative reporter (Michael Caine) and his 12 year old son stumble on the pirates.......and before you can say 'yo ho ho', Caine's enslaved to help make fresh pirate babies who won't pop out like the current crew, all inbred idiots (forced into a literal pirate booty call with what appears to be the buccaneers' only exhausted female.)....while his son, after a few days of 24/7 abuse, involving toothpicks to hold his eyes open,  quickly converts to a nasty little mini-pirate, eager to kill...

                  Other directors might have assembled this footage to make you worry terribly for Caine and his boy, to sit up and root for Caine to exact bloody vengeance on this mumbling, monstrous coterie of creeps.  He does indeed, but by the time Caine goes all "Wild Bunch" on their asses you barely care anymore.  You get the feeling all the way through that Michael Ritchie knew how hopelessly ridiculous it all was, directing the carnage with a slight, knowing smirk, distancing himself from turning the film into either an outright comedy or a gripping thriller.  So he settles for nothing.

                   Audiences didn't know what to make of it either..... certainly no comedy-horror crowd pleaser like "Jaws".....it played more like a mean-spirited, R-rated Grindhouse drive-in triple feature movie.  Caine disowned it immediately, never discussing it again.....(though frankly, he's had far worse movies in his filmography than this one......and we'd welcome his thoughts on it, if any....)

                  Any redeeming features for the BQ?  Hmmmm.....not so much. There's an Ennio Morricone score rumbling in the background, but it doesn't do much for the film. And there's some brief scene stealing from that unsettling, strange British character actor Dudley Sutton as the scummiest of the pirates. Blood 'n gore lovers can get their jollies at the finale, when Caine, to his everlasting delight, gets his hands on a Coast Guard 50 caliber machine gun......(speaking of the Coast Guard, their cooperation with this movie defies reason, considering that their young, brave recruits are depicted as clueless jerks, waiting to be slaughtered....)

                   No gold doubloons for this one.....we'll give it two jellyfish stings (**)......300 less stings than Caine and his pirate bride endure......putting them through almost as much pain as it takes to sit through this film......