Search - Miss Cast Away & The Island Girls on DVD

Couldn't hate it more

Gina Glansing | 08/14/2006

(1 out of 5 stars)

"While this was an incredibly bad movie, it's not the kind where you will say "it's so bad, it's good." More likely you'd say "I'm really angry I wasted ninety minutes of my life watching that." Personally I hated it so much I trampled the dvd box cover, wishing the whole time that it was the director's head. A plane containing beauty contestants crashes, and the babes must survive on a desert island inhabited by a giant prehistoric pig and failed extras from Planet of the Apes. There's also a thin love story and there's Michael Jackson, a hologram secret agent who decrees the castaways must destroy Noah's Ark to save the Earth. There are a couple mysteries about this film. Why did a talented actor like Eric Roberts agree to join the cast? Did he have gambling debts? Was he blackmailed? And then there's Michael Jackson. Why did they want him for this movie? And with the horrendous jokes and largely incompetent acting, why would he want to be in it? Supremely bad career move. You'll be really mad at yourself if you spend the time or, God forbid, money to watch it."

Three Minutes of Michael Jackson, and Painfully Long and Ter

Tsuyoshi | Kyoto, Japan | 09/05/2005

(1 out of 5 stars)

"The most famous person included in this terribly unfunny comedy is Michael Jackson, whose face you can see on DVD cover. But remember, Michael Jackson is in the film for about 3 minutes (or maybe more) and you have to wait more than one hour to see him as 'Agent M.J.'

As the title suggests, the film is a spoof of many of recent hit films ranging from 'Cast Away' 'Miss Congeniality' 'The Sixth Sense' 'Catch Me If You Can' etc. The comedy is in the vein of 'Airplane!' so Eric Roberts plays the caddish pilot of an airplane flying to Japan, carrying beauty pagents. But my point is not its story, nor low-budget origin.

The problem is, 'Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls' needs much, much, much more jokes and gags, clever or gross or whatever funny to sustain its 90 minutes. You need to think of jokes better than saying 'I can see dead people' and show the lookalike of Elvis and Chaplin. The film has no hilarious mood that Abrams/Zucker/Zucker had imbued their classic comedy with.

Films like 'Naked Gun' 'Hot Shots!' and 'Austin Power' in fact spend so much energy to create tons of silly gags, and that's how they work. They are made with one minute one gag (or more) basis, and we keep watching, enjoying the show. 'Miss Cast Away' only repeats the same pattern of jokes over and over again. In 'The Island' you can see one fierce creature, actually a big bad pig named 'Jurassic Pork' with a subtitle 'Jurassic Pork' and ... there's nothing more, well, except it attacks the poor passangers on the beach. And one of them is eaten by the animal. If you think it's funny, it's your film.

I know no one watches this kind of film to see great CGIs, but the cheesy special effects of this film make me wonder whether it is meant as serious or joke. 'Jurassic Pork' is one example, of which effects are worse than the animations in the pop-ups. I think it is intentional, but even so, the slack timing and editing makes it look like otherwise.

Anyway, this is not my cup of tea as one old lady (perhaps the director's own mother) at the end credit says. Believe me or not, she is much funnier than most of the jokes in the film."

An insult to human intelligence!

L Gontzes | Athens, Greece | 08/22/2008

(1 out of 5 stars)

"I'm going to have to agree with most of the previous reviewers in saying that this is indeed the worst of films compared to other spoofs out there.
There are no words to describe how AWFUL (!!!) this `movie' was from beginning to end, but let me try anyway so as to give people a fair chance to avoid it and thus try and prevent their day/evening from being ruined.
Miss Cast Away & The Island Girls, follows in the footsteps of Date Movie, Shriek if You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th, Epic Movie, and the Scary Movie series, and is a parody of several films including Forrest Gump, Planet of the Apes, Men in Black, Cast Away, The Sixth Sense, and The Green Mile among others.
The major setback is in relation to the acting (or lack of it); that is to say that the cast are badly in need of acting lessons (even Eric Roberts was pathetic)! The acting-oh my- the acting is beyond words...
School plays (and pre-school for that matter) have better actors! It is truly sad...
Another weakness is in relation to the very poor dialogues and the weak plot/storyline for which the writers and director are to blame.
In essence, the film might have had potential if only the writers/director had the ability to... write and direct! A shame really...
In a nutshell, you mind find it amusing if you're under 13 and/or are heavily intoxicated, and that's about it. Rent or buy (ha ha ha) at your own risk. You have been warned!
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This film is NOT a comedy!

A. Regolino | New York | 11/23/2009

(1 out of 5 stars)

"There are many shocks associated with this movie. The most obvious is that Michael Jackson actually appears in the film, and it is not just a lookalike as in other film parodies. Reading the credits provides a few major shocks: I couldn't believe there was actually a director of photography working on this film (film students deliver more professional looking results) or that there are people credited for the special effects (YOU can do better on your home computer). I'm shocked by how this film is categorized: as a comedy? Really? Just because it mixes together characters and situations from different movies in the guise of a parody doesn't qualify it for being a comedy. In order to fit this qualification, there really is only one requirement: an occasional joke! Unfortunately the director did not hire a writer but insists on writing his own work, providing another shock: how could a person go so long without grasping the concept of humor? Has anyone EVER told him a joke? I'm not exaggerating or being mean; there's not one joke in this film? Writer/director Bryan Michael Stoller (if you're asking Who? there's no shock there) demonstrates what he THINKS is funny early in the film when two characters whose cell phone connection cuts out yell "Can you hear me?" into their phones over and over. Are you rolling on your sides? Stoller expects you to.

If you doubt that Stoller does not understand comedy, consider this shocker: there is actually one person who delivers a good performance in this film (yes, I know, that in itself is a shock) and the director hardly uses him at all. The person I am referring to is the one who delivers a very convincing impersonation of Austin Powers; this person should have been the star of the film. If he was, there might have been some actual humor, even accidentally, injected into this intended-comedy. (Or maybe it wasn't intended to be a comedy and Stoller was trying to do a sci-fi adventure?) The film stars Eric Roberts (I'd be shocked if you're shocked at this) and Charlie Schlatter (who sadly could never again regain the acclaim he achieved for 18 Again!) and a cast of bikini-clad beauties. No, their bikinis never come off, and yes that would have been an obvious way to make this movie infinitely more watchable. I suppose Stoller deserves some credit in the virtue department for not taking that route, but it seriously WOULD have made watching this film less of a painful experience.

The biggest shock of all of course is that this movie was actually produced, and I'd be seriously shocked if Stoller is proud of his completed product. If you can imagine what it would be like to have a robot with a computer program that tells it HOW to create a parody, but which otherwise has no inherent ability to develop humor on its own, you might have some idea what this film is like. The ingredients are all there, but there is no chef to make anything of them, and so they are all spoiling and waiting to be tossed into the trash (which, by the way, is the perfect place to deposit this film).
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