jdollak The positive traits of this movie are largely technical. The sound is clear. The lighting is actually sort of pleasing, since they don't rely on shadow for tension. And the picture is entirely focused well. The pacing is perfectly fine. Despite the weaknesses of the movie, I rarely felt too distracted, and the story moved right along.But those things said, this movie feels sort of like a restrained Uwe Boll movie. The plot is pretty straightforward, but there are reversals on reversals as the story moves further.The enemy the team is facing seems to be the same black cloud that appeared in The House on Haunted Hill. But this time, they can fight it with fire extinguisher guns!The plot doesn't bother me too much though, it just felt like an adaptation of a video game.But what does play badly in this movie is that the cast is inadequate for the silliness of the script. By this I mean, the cast is probably just fine. But the script has so much comic-book dialogue that it's hard to play those lines and come across genuine. As a result, there are a lot of people who sound like they're acting as hard as they can.

Jan Strydom I've gone through a trend of low budget movies that were not really bad but they were just not worth recommending, DARK ISLAND was probably the weakest low budget film of them all, it was like having LOST and THE SUPERNATURAL tossed in a blender add to that some really bad acting from virtually every cast member and a pace that goes from slow to slower at times.Aside from the acting the film did have its entertaining moments but out of the previous bunch of films I saw which include ANNHILATION EARTH, QUANTUM APOCAPLYPSE and the game to film adaptation of THE KING OF FIGHTERS, this is the last one I would recommend, its not even a good time passer because it is way too slow for that.

rick3197 Criticism is something that a lot of people find it hard to both explain and deal with and there are some who just ignore it all together, as such Dark Island is one of those many low budget action/horror movies that has so far had received very negative reception from critics, but from the film company's point of view they probably do not care as long as the film sells well enough to make money. Dark Island copies the many successful franchises like the Lost and Resident Evil series by putting them together with a cast of unknown actors and first time directors on some Canadian island.Why is this film bad? The first question should be what isn't bad? Well it's not the low budget, as some low budget horror films have succeed both financially and critically like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. It's not the special effects which I think are some of the best special effects I have ever seen on a low budget movie, the detail on the black fog monsters is very good but I personally think CGI means very little when judging how good a film is, and I hate those Avatar lovers who only think Avatar is good because of its state of the art computer generated imagery.The acting is only decent at best, just by watching the film you can tell that the actors are trying so hard to play the roles of their characters to make their acting as realistic as possible, the acting does not suck but they could at least be more relaxed about it.Now for the answer to the question, why is this movie bad? Well it's the story, editing and script (if they even used a script and storyboards) the story is just plain bad from the start to finished and it has been done many, many times before it in far better ways. A group of people from different backgrounds are sent to a secret island that is run by Altracorp an evil corporation that specializes in developing biological weapons for the military, the same as the Umbrella corporation from the Resident Evil series, each character is not who they seem and they all have their own flashback sequence like in the Lost TV series, the story also has a twist ending which is not really worth waiting for, as I watch the film I feel as though the film's target audience was a dumb, uneducated audience. Now that's the story covered, another bad thing about the film is its action sequences which are very poorly edited and badly produced, they are often very cheesy and are not real enough to be taken seriously.I will not be recommending Dark Island to anyone wanting to see an action sci-fi movie. It's not the worst movie I have ever seen but it does add to my top 10 worst movies I have ever seen list and while its special effects did save it from a 1/10 rating I still dislike this film and hope that this review will save you from both renting or buying this movie, it does not deserve your hard earned money.3/10

Yogi When the movie started, I kinda got a feeling like it's a bit of a remake of Ghost Ship, but 15 minutes later I had to change my mind about it... it kinda took the elements of the series Lost. Maybe the writers thought that if they took the elements from a hugely successful story, that they couldn't go wrong. Well... they were wrong, BIG TIME! People changing into a black killer smoke and for some reason they have to get off the island?! People trapped on the island and of course no way to get off of it? Doesn't it sound like Lost? Well... if you haven't seen lost, go buy the DVD pack instead of wasting your money on this movie. At least you'll enjoy hours watching a good story, instead of this screw up.