Sorry, this movie sucks

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Island of the Dead is set on 'Hart Island' which is situated just of the coast of New York where unclaimed & unidentified bodies are buried, ex cop Melissa O'Keefe (Talisa Soto) who now works missing persons is trying to track someone down & reckon they might be buried on Hart Island so she decides to go over there. However she's picked a busy day for it as unscrupulous property developer Rupert King (Malcolm McDowell) plans to redevelop the island & build lots of apartments. He sends his man Rodger (Paul Hopkins) to take soil samples but he ends up being attacked by flies/bees/wasps or what ever they are & he ends up dead. The flies/bees/wasps then attack everyone else, wow, you can almost feel the excitement...Written & directed by Tim Southam I thought Island of the Dead was total complete & utter crap, to be blunt. The script is terrible, for a start there isn't one single reasonable explanation for these killer files/bees/wasps, not one. Thy are just there & that's it, they also seem to be intelligent a they can actually distinguish between people although it begs the question if all they wanted to do was kill the bad guy & they let the heroes go free at the end why did they kill some of the good guys to start with? Anyway, one things for sure they are more intelligent than the script, a lot more intelligent. Then there's the highly annoying character's, Soto's missing person detective just sort of walks around a bit & has a disinterested look on her face while there's plenty of clichés here as well like the ex-cons, the greedy businessman who gets his comeuppance & the good hearted cop, please give me a break. There is one laughable scene when someone wants to give his dead friend a burial even though there's a swarm of killer flies/bees/wasps buzzing around outside & he actually intends to dig the hole & put the body in it as well! When all said & done though what kills this film stone dead is the fact that it provides zero entertainment, I cannot think of one single positive aspect to this film, it's incredibly slow & boring, it's predictable & it even tries to have a moral message about the homeless & missing people which just feels so heavy handed & out of place in such a rotten film. I hate everything about this film, it's as simple & straight forward as that.Director Southam does nothing to make the film watchable, there's some highly annoying rap music & lots of irritating camera technique's which just look terrible & annoy more than impress. I'm not sure whether the things which buzz, fly & sting are flies/bees or wasps as they are never shown in close-up, all we get is a big black cloud when they attack & lots of buzzing noises. There are lots of maggots but not much in the way of gore.Technically Island of the Dead is below average, the effects don't even stretch to showing the killer flies/bees/wasps, the entire thing looks like it was set in an overcast field & as such is extremely drab & dull to look at. The acting was awful & I cannot believe an actor such as Malcolm McDowell needs money badly enough to appear in a piece of crap such as this, was it really worth it Malcolm? Well, was it?Island of the Dead is crap, there's nothing else to say really. I can't imagine anyone getting anything like entertainment out of this total waste of time, definitely one to avoid.

This movie starts out pretty nice with a pretty "ok" plot...Melissa is working at the missing persons department of the New York PD and she's investigating a case of a missing child, who is also an orphan. There is a deserted island where they put all the nameless people who've died and she decides to go out there to see if the child is buried there. Another person, wealthy billionaire Rupert King, has decided to turn the island into a new hope (Hope City) for the homeless and poor. He and his men go out to the island to start the building of the new city, and he obviously as some evil plans in his back pocket.And this is where the movie turns sour...The plot disappears completely. Flies starts to come out of the corpses. If you get bitten, you die almost instantly. And then more flies (and maggots, why?) starts to crawl out of your decaying body to attack your friends.. Fade to black. -END PICTURE- *YUCK* :-P

I found this move interesting, mostly because it was filmed on Hart Island, which is sort of the Potter's Field for New York City. Hart Island is a desolate, God-forsaken plot of land in Long Island Sound that is totally off-limits to everyone except the prisoners from Riker's Island who are assigned burial duty there.The acting was O.K., except for Malcolm McDowell, who came across as cartoonish. Talisa Soto was nice to look at, but her character was, as someone else had mentioned, wooden. There was no meaningful character development, and you never really cared about any of the characters. The plot was not even remotely believable. It was a *boring* movie.But it's biggest sin was the cinematography. Virtually the entire picture was shot about 2 stops too low, probably to add a feeling of gloominess to the picture, but it just made watching the movie irritating. And when they got to the night scenes, you couldn't see much of anything. Just a bunch of voices in the dark.Unless you're very interested in Hart Island, don't waste your time or money renting this one.

**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.