Let’s make it a rule: no more films based on mid-20th century TV shows. Television reboots are fine, but no more movies – except possibly an I Dream of Jeannie movie wherein Jeannie engages in a Godzilla-style kaiju battle (write that down, Hollywood). We need this rule to prevent future cinematic disasters like Will Smith’s 1999 Wild Wild West and the subject of this review, Fantasy Island.

As can be taken from the title of this review, this movie is quite simply terrible. The writing is inane, the characters are morons, and it commits the worst of all the sins a horror movie can commit – it’s not scary. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Fantasy Island, it was a tv show in the late 1970s to early 1980s best known for Hervé Jean-Pierre Villechaize shouting “Ze Plane, Ze Plane” and Ricardo Montalban’s big break into stardom. For those of you born after the year 2000, Montalban played Juni Cortez’s grandfather in the second and third Spy Kids films and voiced Senor Senior Senior in Kim Possible. Unfortunately, both of these men have passed, and even if they hadn’t, they were both far too good for this trash.

Speaking of actors who are too good for this trash, Michael Peña has no business playing the role of Mr. Roarke here. Peña is an excellent actor, but he lacks the charismatic presence of Montalban. The rest of the cast includes notables such as Maggie Q, of Nikita and Designated Survivor fame, Lucy Hale, of Pretty Little Liars, and Michael Rooker. They do their best, but there’s just nowhere to go with writing this bad. In fact, you can almost pinpoint exactly where the writers realized that there was nowhere to go with this and just started throwing random nonsense in, like when zombies show up in a movie that had nothing to do with zombies up to that point.

All in all, 0 out of 5.

Pirate a copy and then burn it without watching it.