In short: Piñata: Survival island (2002)

aka Demon Island

aka Survival Island

Two boatloads of frat people (our future heroes are played by Nicholas Brendon and Jaime Pressly, because that’s what can happen to your career, too, buddy) are dropped off on some godsforsaken island for a weekend tradition of drunken debauchery and some so-called “race” where handcuffed boy/girl pairs are running through the jungle collecting underwear that’s hanging in the trees and bushes, hitting piñatas full of little alcohol bottles to keep, ahem, hydrated. Clearly, these sad examples of humanity need killing badly, so it is a bit of a good turn of fortune for the audience that a legendary piñata containing the sins of a Mesoamerican village has found its way to the island too. A couple of smacks with a stone later, the thing’s running around murdering drunken idiots and idiotesses left and right, hooray.

Look, I know you can’t expect art, taste or style when you sit down to watch a movie about a murderous piñata, and if you go into a thing like this with anything but the lowest expectations, you’ll only suffer the more for it. However, there are crap movies at least being entertaining in their way, and then there’s David and Scott Hillenbrand’s Piñata: Survival Island, a thing made with such staggering incompetence, it hides its only selling point, a Chiodo brothers creature that looks as if they had put it together in a lunch break - or perhaps two - behind terrible CGI effects and a monster attack camera so jittery, one might suspect Tony Scott being involved in the production.

What else is there the film could have to offer? Thirty year olds playing college students? Jokes so terrible, they wouldn’t know funny if it eviscerated them with a machete? Characters that can’t die quickly enough? Monster vision sequences that consist of unparsable red? A lack of technical acumen so complete, you might sell it as a black hole?


It’s really, really bad, and not bad in the way that makes one think wistfully of aliens making movies, or people making movies who have only ever heard of the art but never seen a film, but the way that makes one think less of everyone involved in the stinker one has suffered through.

In short: Unholy (2007)

Hope (Siri Baruc), a seemingly happy young woman, commits suicide on her birthday right in front of her mother Martha (Adrienne Barbeau!).

Martha can neither accept nor understand her daughter's death. With the help of her son (Nicholas Brendon!, also involved as a producer) she begins to ask seek answers to her many questions. It doesn't need much probing until they find themselves stepping into tinfoil hat world, where a dead Nazi occult scientist working secretly for the US government (or is he?) tries to find the (and I quote the film) "Unholy Trinity" of time travel, invisibility and mind control, using people like her daughter for his experiments.

But now that she knows too much, whom can Martha trust anymore? Her neighbor? Her son? Herself?

 

Many people seem to have their problems with this film, some of them related to not understanding the plot, to which I can only say that this is not a problem caused by the film, but rather by the lack of certain qualities in the viewer. Others seem to think the movie's not all that believable.

I can relate to the latter problem, though I have found the method of dragging my unbelief out of bed, shooting it and then burying it in the cellar of my brain to work quite wonderfully against it.

After doing that, one suddenly finds a fine little low budget film with ambitions, clever ideas and an entertaining amount of weirdness.

The acting is especially interesting (and for once in a film like this quite good): while Barbeau and Brendon are playing their roles in a straight realist mode, the rest of the actors practices conscious overacting which amplifies the weirdness factor beautifully.

Once you ignore the plausibility question, the film's plot leads to a neat and consequent conclusion. All questions are answered, everything makes sense inside the rules the film has established - what more can you ask for?

Recommended to everyone who is not afraid to suspend poor old battered disbelief for some time and/or who likes conspiracy theories for their sheer madness rather than their supposed truth.

 

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