Tss5078 For some odd reason I like things that take place on deserted islands. J.J. Abrams has showed us that there are so many ways to go and that the possibilities are endless, but to be honest I didn't expect much from this film. As it turns out, Haylie Duff isn't a bad actress and Fear Island wasn't a bad movie! This film was exciting, engaging, smart, and pretty well written. Many parts of the story, especially the ending were predictable; however it was still a great story. Fear Island is one of those movies you watch because it appears in your instant recommendations and there isn't anything else to watch, so you give it a chance, and what you find is that it's actually a pretty worthwhile film.

Neil Welch A small group of teens on an island is murdered, one by one.Professionally made and attractively photographed, this murder mystery / slasher horror is routine, utterly predictable, and totally devoid of thrills. Its one claim to mild originality is the way it is told in flashback by the amnesiac last survivor. Unfortunately, by its very nature, this robs the "last man standing" element of any suspense, leaving us to discover only the order and manner of deaths, the reason why, and the expected final twist.This is not "the worst film I have ever seen" - far from it - but it has nothing out of the ordinary to recommend it.

Scarecrow-88 The other Duff sister gets her own slasher vehicle, a real dud with a twist you can see coming a mile away. A group of hot-looking college kids decide to yacht to a nice island retreat for some partying which turns sour really quickly when a killer, with a reason for his/her vengeance, ruins the festivities, murdering them one by one, leaving "clues" as to why each member is a victim, words in white paint, like INNOCENT and GUILTY. It all could be the result of a cruel sex prank played on an attractive but unpopular nobody in their school who went missing shortly afterward. The movie goes back and forth between a detective and psychologist questioning amnesia-stricken Hayley Duff and her reports (as they return to her supposedly in fragments told in jarring flashbacks) and the events that supposedly transpired during the death weekend on Fear Island. The movie pretty much casts doubt on Duff immediately because Haley isn't much of an actress who can play a tragic victim that convincingly or maybe it was the poor direction which never allows us to believe she is telling us the whole truth. I rarely believed much of anything the flashbacks were telling me and the psychologist, who seems to be on her side at first, while the detective is hard-nose-to-the-grindstone with her at the onset soon thinks she might be a victim instead of killer (which tells you how stupid his character is as I'm no detective and Duff practically has guilty stamped on her forehead due to her fishy, suspicious performance), denounces large pieces of her fractured testimony as not wholly matching the evidence recovered at the crime scene. Yet, this slasher film expects us to swallow the conclusion where the psychologist, who has reservations about Duff's innocence, actually accepts a drink from her before the parents are about to arrive, just proving that someone who is skilled at reading behavior doesn't seem so smart when it matters most. The scenes on the island are of the tiresome PG-13 variety, with characters right out of a I Know What You Did Last Summer sequel. None of the kill-scenes will leave you very overwhelmed..a rattlesnake bite to the chest is really as gory as it gets as most of the deaths are of the off-screen variety. Boring, with zero thrills, "Fear Island" will induce heavy snoring.

jonathanruano "Fear Island" is a teen horror film about a psychotic murderer killing teens on an island. It is a cross between "I still know what you did last summer" and "The Usual Suspects" - and that is its problem. "Fear Island," apart from having a terrible title (can you think of a less original title than "Fear Island"?,)is too formula-driven and obviously a rip off of other films. When I watched "Fear Island," it struck me that no one who was involved in the making of this movie wanted to do anything intelligent or novel with the plot or the characters. I read the other two reviews and they credit the film for its twist at the end(though their applause is very tepid), but even that twist was ripped off from another movie, called "The Usual Suspects." Indeed, if you watch the ending of "Fear Island" and the ending of "The Usual Suspects," you are essentially watching the same film.There are also problems with the logic in the storyline. By the time "Fear Island" was released, most teens would have owned their second or third cellphone, which raises the question of why none of the characters in this film had cell phones to call the police when they realized that there was a killer on the island. Perhaps they missed out on the technological revolution, not to mention pop culture. The other logical problem is with the interrogators - a male police officer and a female psychologist. The former is convinced that Jenna (Haylie Duff) is the killer, while the latter is more skeptical. But by the end of the film, they both arrive at the opposite conclusion. Why? Don't they listen to each other? Didn't it occur to them to have a meeting of minds? Do police solve crimes by operating in their own little bubbles? In the minds of the people who made this film, apparently so. Also there is only one killer on the entire island and he has no lethal weapon (like a gun or explosives), which raises the logical question of why he is so successful in wiping out the teens, three of whom do bench presses in their spare time. Are the teens so stupid that they cannot find an intelligent way to murder or imprison one killer? The final problem is with the characters. There is not one sympathetic character in this entire movie. As Jenna (Haylie Duff) pointed out early in the film, her friends went to the island to have sex, get drunk or both. Now people who live only for the purpose of drinking and having sex are unlikely to generate much sympathy (in fact I was more interested in the possibility of sex scenes) -- which is why we really do not care when they get killed and that is the main reason why this film does not succeed at being scary. Furthermore, the fact that these characters are stupid means that they are not interesting to watch either. So what you essentially have are a bunch of boring, brainless teens who are not worth caring about who are systematically killed over the course of the film in rather unoriginal ways by a somewhat more intelligent mass murderer. So thumbs down for me.