What a rollercoaster this was.
I'm a big fan of Z-grade cinema especially when done by someone with a bloated ego such as director Vitaliy Versace (famously featured on Redlettermedia for his vampire epic "last vampire on earth") who I'm still not convinced isn't secretly a character by a multimedia performance artist.
You not only get the enjoyment of a terrible baffling movie, that can sometimes be borderline surreal art, but you also get the meta-level of trying to decipher what happened behind the scenes, why things were done a certain way and what the creator's mental state was. Well, I enjoy such things at least.
A lot of these elements are in place in Utoya island too. It's cinematic garbage but of the interesting kind. As an example, it's supposed to take place in Norway, they even got police uniforms resembling the real norwegian ones, yet every character has names like Kyle and Sheila, and they are acted like aliens in people suits unfamiliar with human speech. This could have been hilarious and to my dismay I have to admit the movie got a few chuckles out of me for its grandiose incompetence.
What spoils this fun fatally though is the unfortunate reality of the actual Utoya massacre it's based on. There have been tasteful takes on this dark day in norwegian history, but this is most definitely not one of them. It's disgusting, insulting and exploitive and as such belongs on the garbage pile of history.
