I’m a big fan of WWII films. I’ve seen so many over the years that I can’t count. A few of those have been horror films that take the various stories of this globe spanning war and made them terrifying to watch. Overlord, Shadow in the Cloud, and Inglorious Bastards are a few that come to mind. The latest to add to that list is Monster Island, a Shudder Release. It deals with a story involving the Pacific Theater, which is a little different from the others I’ve mentioned. It’s an interesting movie that combines two famous cery monsters you might be familiar with.

During WWII in the South Pacific, a Japanese ship was being bombed by Allied Bombers. While this was going on two soldiers, one British and the other a Japanese traitor were being tortured for information. When they both take quite a bit of punishment before the Japanese officer in charge decides to tie them together by a chain attached to their ankles to the ship that is about to sink because of the repetitive bombings. They end up in the ocean trying not to drown but wash up on the shore of a nearby island. That’s just the beginning of the story, though.

As these two men were on opposing sides of the war they don’t trust each other very much, but when they start to come under attack from multiple directions and that they are tied together they reluctantly start to work together to try and survive. They are both captured by Japanese Soldiers who made it ashore using life jackets, but there is an even deadlier force on this island that is much more threatening to all of them. And that is monsters that look like a mix between Predators and the Creature From the Black Lagoon. When the monsters get close, they even make Predator-esque sounds. They have very long sharp teeth and claws to match. These are pretty interesting looking creatures. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to come face to face with them, that’s for sure. They were creepy.

One film that has a similar vibe to it as Monster Island is Hell in the Pacific. This film is from 1968, and stars Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune and is directed by John Boorman. It’s a classic story going back centuries, but this one had quite the more recent representation from the two men on opposing sides of WWII. This is a good movie that inspired the new one, but it doesn’t mean Monster Island is any better than that one, though. Inspiration is the greatest form of flattery. I always say if the newer version, reboot/remake, isn’t as good, you still have the original to fall back on. That’s the case here. This film isn’t even close to the other two I mentioned above.

One of the problems I had with Monster Island is the cinematography.  The film has a lot of scenes that take place at night. With that comes lighting the scenes so people can see what is going on, and this movie doesn’t do that. The film uses moonlight to light some of the scenes. The rest of them are just darkly lit. It’s hard to watch a movie when it’s darkly lit like this one is. Various scenes in a cave and dense lush jungle are hard to see. I was looking forward to watching a monster movie set during WWII, but this took me out of the film completely. 

The two main actors who play imprisoned men are Dean Fujioka and Callum Woodhouse. They have a very good chemistry opposite each other. Even though one speaks in Japanese with subtitles on screen, the banter he and the other have with each other is one of the better parts of the movie. I have seen a lot of stories before or rather wrestling matches that have used this story subplot in them for many years now. The way the director played these guys off of each other and had them team up in the end worked out nicely. I was invested in them even though other aspects of the movie didn’t work for me.

The filmmaker Mike Wiyuan obviously had inspiration with this movie. He used samurai films and WWII movies and combined them to make a creature feature, originally titled Orang Ikan. In better hands, this could have been a much better film. Maybe the budget had something to do with the overall outcome of the movie. Who knows? This combination of genres should have been a no-brainer for a great creature feature film. The bad cinematography played a huge part in why I wasn’t as big of a fan of Monster Island as much as I wanted to be. It just had an amateurish feel to it from beginning to end. Hopefully, this director will learn from the things that worked and those that didn’t in this film. 

3 stars

Dan Skip Allen