User reviews

This is a low budget production which, at first blush, seems to have only a few things going for it. Sure, McDowell hasn't made a lot of good films lately, but nobody who has seen Clockwork Orange can really doubt that he has substantial talent. And whether or not Talisa Soto and Mos Def are in the plus column is a matter of personal opinion. OK, OK... the film really has very little going for it at first blush.

So, going into this with absolutely no expectations, I was very pleasantly surprised. In fact, I am almost embarrassed to admit - given the hideous ratings here on IMDb for this film... I couldn't turn it off.

What got me? Well, it certainly wasn't the plot. The story starts with a developer (McDowell) with questionably altruistic motives and a scheme to reinvent "the projects" by building an experimental community for the homeless on New York's Hart's Island. Also venturing to the island are a slap crew of short-term convicts and their overseers (assigned to grave-digging) and Soto - a missing persons investigator with a slightly mysterious past. Things start to go very very wrong after about half an hour, and people start to die and decay at a supernatural pace. I won't spoil the film by continuing my discussion, but I will say that although there are no zombies in the film, and virtually no special effects and minimal makeup, there are aspects of this film's atmosphere and basic dynamics which are very reminiscent of George A Romero. But this is very much a New York film.

What got me was not the acting, though there's nothing really wrong with it. Burce Ramsay is very likable and so is Soto. McDowell has a few inspired moments, but this is not one of his best roles. The script didn't quite do it either, since there are at least a couple of spots where the behavior of the characters seems quite ludicrous.

What got me was the way the film was made - the directing and photography, to be More specific. This is a very visually interesting film, involving simple visual ideas, metaphors and symbols which are eerie, creepy, but not at all heavy-handed. And Some truly wonderful decaying urban landscapes.

Island of the Dead is absurd, noticeably low budget, and not very original in most ways, but it also reaches beyond its apparent potential and will entertain you if you let it - and if you like this sort of thing.

**SPOILERS** Sargeant Melissa O'Keefe,Talisa Soto,of the NYPD Missing Person Bureau sets out for Hart Island with a burial unit of convicts to find and identify a young girl. The girl is believed to have be buried on the island's Potters Field and Melissa, who was abundant as an infant herself, has this strong identification with missing persons. Melissa wants at least to have them identified, when found, so that she can put their friends and relatives to rest by not wondering if their alive or dead.

At the island there's a ground-breaking ceremony for a low-rent housing project, Hope City, with the city's mayor and multi-billionaire real estate tycoon Rupert King, Malclom McDowell. The hosing development is being built to keep the riff-raft off the city streets and hide them away there from the public for strictly "humanitariam" purposes. The fact is that King has other purposes for bringing the city's unwanted there and it's for him getting rich by using them as experiments for the pharmaceutical companies that he owns.

You have to have a real strong stomach to sit through this film with people getting attacked by these super flies who not only infect them with their eggs but who cause their victims to burst open and decompose within minutes. The grossed out scenes in the film have countless maggots crawling out of the infected peoples corpses. The mad and arrogant King had been planing to do this for years by using Hart Island as a laboratory and the use poor and unwanted as guinea pigs. Now with him in trouble financially, he had six major failures in a row, this project The Hope City Devlopment will put him back on top but the over one million bodies buried in Potters Field have other ideas for King and their not very pleasant. It's too bad that almost everyone on Hart Island gets eaten from the inside out by the fly hatching maggots with the person that they were really after Rupert King getting his at the very end.

Even though the movie was anything but rational and coherent,especially after some thirty minutes into it, it did for a time hold your interests. The cast also did a much better job then the flimsy material that they were saddled with. There was also the very effective and eerie atmospherics of the spooky Hart Island and Potters field that at times made your flesh crawl. But the plot fell apart with the flies becoming more and more unbelievable as they just seemed to come and go, as if they were out to lunch. Making it possible for those on the island to predict just when it was safe to go outside and eventually escape by boat.One of the most ridicules scenes I've ever seen in a movie is when King is attacked by millions of killer flies and to keep them away from him he blasts away at them with his handgun.

Just awful. Horrible. No redeeming qualities in this one, which isn't always bad for a b-flick -- as long as it doesn't take itself seriously. This one does, though, and its all the worse for it.

There is no plot. There are flies killing people on an island off NYC used to bury the unclaimed dead (hence the title). Not giant flies or special flies, just flies. Why are flies killing people? No explanation is even attempted. They just are.

This movie proves once and for all that Malcolm McDowell's career is over. Everyone involved with this piece of trash needs to be spanked by the ghost of Ed Wood.

I have my own theory about why there are so many flies in this movie. Flies love feces.

A bunch of people--including evil industrialist Malcolm McDowell, policewoman Talisa Soto and prisoner Bruce Ramsay--are on Hart Island--an actual island off the coast of NYC where unidentified dead people are buried. While there they desecrate one of the graves. You would expect by the title that the dead would come to life and attack. Wrong! They instead are attacked by...flies. If the flies bite you, you die and almost immediately begin decomposing.

This sounded pretty promising--not in a good way but a bad camp movie sort of way. Unfortunately this is just bad. The soundtrack has annoying rap songs which don't even fit the movie; the dialogue and characters are all clichés that you've seen and heard before; the fly POV shots are hysterical; in one shot it's daytime--a minute later it's pitch black night (shades of Ed Wood Jr.!); lousy makeup and boring CGI effects and a stubborn refusal to be scary even once! I was so bored I dozed off for about 10 minutes (I didn't miss anything). It really boggles the mind that anyone would think this would ever work.

Some good performances make this bearable--Soto is beautiful but wooden however Ramsay is surprisingly good and McDowell is just great--he's obviously enjoying himself and his enjoyment rubs off (a little). Still this is a stupid, dumb, boring and completely illogical horror film. Right down there with "House of the Dead". A must miss.

This movie was given to me as a gift. So because I own it, I really wanted to like it. Sucks to be me.

The thought that kept bothering me throughout this terrible flick was, "Doesn't anyone have a cell phone?" It was made in 2000. Cell phones were rampant by then, especially in New York City.

The movie had great promise. Hart's Island is a real place, and surprisingly, I've never seen it in a movie before (with the exception of Michael Douglas' "Don't Say a Word" which happened to have one scene on the island. The movie wasn't about the island.) The history of the island is extremely interesting and quite scary. The movie failed to capitalize on any of the history and instead tried to scare us with....

HOUSEFLIES!!! I guess flies and maggots are cheaper and easier to get than zombies. Totally ridiculous.

Plus, the movie had the usual things you see in stupid, poorly written horror movies (i.e. cars that won't start, love interest between two unlikely heroes, etc.).

What a waste. Can I regift it?

99% of all the reviews for this movie are correct.............the packaging makes you believe that it's a zombie movie.........but the only thing dead in this movie is the movie itself. The acting wasn't bad, there just wasn't any freaking zombies. Stay away if possible, unless you like a "bugs-that-sting-you-and-make-you-decompose" type of movie. The packing also noted that the movie was rated "R" for graphic violence..........where was the violence?????????? A complete waste of time. Talisa Soto makes for some cool eye candy when she's not watching urban kids jump rope and singing a stupid song. Again, don't bother.......................

An interesting film directed by Tim Southam in which a small island known to be the burying place for indigents from New York City becomes the setting of some bizarre deaths as well as some political machinations of a Donald Trump-like billionaire who has bought the island and plans on creating housing for the homeless. The characters involved with first landing on the island and then discovering this weird killing force are a female policewoman who is looking for a nameless dead child, forgotten to everyone except her, a prisoner who is innocent of a crime but is doing his time by burying people on the island in mass graves, and a man with gobs of money who has bought the island for seemingly altruistic reasons but in reality has purely selfish goals. The other people on the island die mysteriously with what turns out to be a thinking mass of flies that kills quickly and strips bodies of their flesh and speeds up the decay process twenty-fold. The film suffers from some budgetary concerns as the flies are hardly impressive to see or view. The script also get somewhat trite near the end with little creative tinkering with a situation seen before in other films.That all withstanding, this was quite an unexpected treasure to see. I sat down thinking I was about to watch some special effect laden film about the rotting dead prancing about, but instead I found the film to be very interesting, claustrophobic, decently acted, and even philosophical. Sure there are some things over-done like the girls playing in the streets and the oddly misplaced rap music, but those are small complaints. I am not saying the film is great in any way, but it is a thinking horror film that depends on mood and setting and suggestion rather than what can easily be viewed. Malcom McDowell does an outstanding job in his businessman role. He just oozes with nastiness when he wants to. Talisa Soto also does a rather good job as a cop. Don't brush the film off too quickly nor pay to much mind to the negative reviews. Certainly if you were expecting a film with mindless rotting corpses coming after you with the promise of lots of blood and guts and got a movie with some thought-provoking material you would be disappointed too?

The movie IS odd, but nowhere near as bad as some are saying. Others here are just taking reviewing this horror film waaaay too seriously. I enjoyed it. It's offbeat, but that's what I like about a so-bad-it's-fun kind of movie. This kind of film doesn't have to be logical, so I don't expect it to explain itself. It just is what it is so you enjoy it for what it is. McDowell is really fun to watch. He plays the bad guy with pure glee. As fun-bad horror movies go I like this one. It's very different and I like that the creepy location, Hart Island, is a real place. I would watch it several times more and have.

Donald Trump-like developer Rupert King (Malcolm McDowell), missing persons detective Melissa O'Keefe (Talisa Soto), the New York City Mayor, and a number of inmates and an assortment of other characters converge as they are all headed towards Hart Island. Hart Island, just off of the Bronx in Long Island Sound, is home of the infamous "Potter's Field"--a massive graveyard of the poor and unknown. King has plans to turn the island into government assistance housing. When the graves are disturbed however, supernatural forces come into play to put an end to any tampering.

Island Of The Dead begins with a lot of promise. The initial voice-over by O'Keefe is interesting, as it explains that she was an abandoned infant and is now searching for a missing girl from a famous year-old case. The introduction of two prisoners, handcuffed to a "meat-locker" drawer in a morgue as they wait to go on burial duty at Hart Island is intriguing. And King is at least passable when we first meet him (McDowell vacillates between passable and good throughout the film).

Our trip over to Hart Island, following our cast of characters as they ride the ferry across Long Island Sound, is good, too, and Mos Def, whom we meet on the boat, is funny—deservedly, Mos Def has already been in a large number of films since Island Of The Dead. Even Hart Island is captivating at first. I'm not sure if it was actually filmed on Hart Island, which is still under the supervision of the New York State Department of Corrections and has very limited access, but whatever the location, it is beautifully stark--an appropriate setting for a horror film. With one exception, there is a lot of good cinematography throughout the early part of the film, including the landscape of (or standing for) Hart Island and especially shots of some marvelous dilapidated buildings, where some scenes are set and more should have been. The exception to good cinematography in the early part of the film is a digital video pan across some old buildings, shot from a vehicle or on a dolly, which becomes pixelated halfway through. Apparently, this was the only footage extant of this, and they really wanted to use it, because despite the flaw, it is inserted a couple times.

The story up to this point, although perhaps a bit slow and a bit odd at times, such as the dialogue scene between King and the Mayor where we cannot hear what they're saying but instead hear a rap song, is more than satisfactory. Most of the facts and history of Hart Island given in the script are actually true, even though some of it might seem implausible to someone unfamiliar with this New York City oddity (another film which is partially about Hart Island, and worth watching if the island intrigues you, is Don't Say A Word (2001)).

However, somewhere around the middle, unfortunately just about the time that the horror material really begins to kick in, writer/director Tim Southam loses his pacing. Not too long after that, he also loses the plot. Some of the horror material is okay--the effects are decent for a low-budget, direct-to-video release, but the pacing kills most of the tension that would have been available. Worse, once we become more familiar with the menace, the "rules of the game" get progressively more ambiguous. We don't know why the menace attacks the way it does or who it does, and late in the proceedings, a few characters take inexplicable actions. By the end, it seems like Southam is drawing thriller plot clichés out of a hat and rushing through them because he's about to run out of film. It's even more of a shame because the beginning was so promising.

My final verdict, while positive, is just slightly so--a 6 out of 10.

Really. I love decaying villages and buildings, wastelands and deserted landscapes. That's what was hoping for, even when I knew the movie itself would be bad. "A ghost town" there is, on that island. Maybe some eerie film footage? Laughable, the whole movie, the story, the mood, everything.

In the "Ghost village" they enter one building. About two minutes later they are back in that cheap house, where they keep returning to half of the movie. The flies... well okay I knew how this aspect would turn out... just horrible. There's rarely any plot, and still there are holes in it that were perplexing at best. Why would the flies "kill" those other people when you get the conclusion? Why is Malcolm's character blowing up something all of a sudden?

Avoid this peace.

If I had it to do over again, I would have spent the time wasted on this movie doing my algebra homework. And I just hope by saying so that I might be preventing some other people from watching this boring, stupid, pointless, worthlessly predictable movie.

One good thing about it - it's easy to trash. There's this group of people all with business on a New York island where unclaimed dead people end up. Then, too long into the movie, the flies there start killing people. Apparently the flies have an agenda. Because the flies left her and her genuflecting friend alone, the heroine figured it out. "They wanted King!" she proclaimed.

Ugh. I really hate this movie. HATE it! Some other movies I hate are Beethoven (about the St. Bernard), Portrait of a Lady, Event Horizon. But all of those are better than Island of the Dead.

Movie is just BAD, I'm a horror movie fan myself, but this movie was just BORING, and the plot is just stupid. Good thing I saw it on cable, I'd feel terrible if I paid something to rent or watch this movie.