Watch or Walk Away?

Kaiju mavens, cool your nuclear flame breath — Monster Island (now streaming on Shudder) is just the generic-ass name for a new creature feature, not a flick set on the fictional locale from the old Godzilla films. The original title for it is Orang Ikan, named after a cryptid from Southeast Asian myth that some call a “mermaid” but here quite closely resembles our old gillman pal from The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Singaporean filmmaker Mike Wiluan wrote and directed this (mostly) two-hander that becomes a three-hander after two marooned World War II soldiers have to stave off a nasty, nasty “man fish” bent on slicing them up like sashimi — and the movie delivers, as they say, exactly what it says on the tin.

The Gist: It’s 1944. A Japanese “hell ship” full of POWs destined for slave labor poots through the ocean. It’s rat-infested and gross as eff but still preferable to what’s about to come. Japanese soldier Saito (Dean Fujioka) is lucky he isn’t dead already — he committed a Treasonous Act To Be Named Later, and the rules state that he can’t be executed until they reach dry land. His temporary fate is to be chained to captured Allied prisoner Bronson (Callum Woodhouse), who has a history of escape attempts. Moments after their ankles are connected by shackles and a length of chain, the ship is dive-bombed and torpedoed in a frenzy of chaotic edits, and the two guys dive into the water before the whole shebang goes down.

This not being yet another summer shark movie, Saito and Bronson aren’t chomped at all before they wash up on the shore of a nearby tropical island along with corpses and miscellaneous debris. Once they awaken, their first instinct is to pummel the crud out of each other. Bronson tries to choke Saito but Saito clobbers Bronson with a conch shell, and all that. Because they’re chained together, the brouhaha sometimes resembles the knife fight in the ‘Beat It’ video where the two dudes had their arms bandana’d together. And they have an audience: We’re privy to a very intensely fisheyed POV shot observing the scuffle, and then attacking Bronson. Saito finds a pistol and fires a shot at the POV Thing, which splashes off, either scared or hurt or perhaps content to eat something for dinner that doesn’t fight back so hard.

Shaken by the encounter, Bronson and Saito call a truce. They share a crab dinner and figure out a way to break the chain and realize they aren’t so different after all and experience empathetic feelings for each other and why don’t they just kiss and get married and get it over with? They are united by the need to fight, fend off and/or kill the POV Thing in order to survive, and I’d be a liar if I said there was anything more to this plot than a series of violent encounters with a creature that seems to relish doing hideous things to human heads and organs (not really a spoiler alert: other humans end up on the island, so the movie can have its cake by showing beheadings, and eat it too by allowing our protags to survive for at least the first two acts). Does it matter why it’s so bent on killing them? Does it need a reason? Probably not, as long as we’re entertained by it, right?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Predator and The Creature from the Black Lagoon are the obvious references, with bits of the opposites-unite plot of Enemy Mine, ewww-goo from Aliens, and WWII monster drama of Godzilla Minus One thrown in.

Performance Worth Watching: Fujioka has the biggest character arc here, and all but wordlessly communicates a complicated melange of despair and desperation as Saito’s fight for survival finds him transitioning from hopeless to hopeful.

Memorable Dialogue: (Chitters like a Yautja)

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: It’s easy to admire Wiluan’s desire to craft a visually driven narrative with minimal dialogue. The story is streamlined and uncomplicated in true genre-film fashion. He holds to the classic methodology in which shadowy bits of the creature are shown out of focus or in corners of the frame, holding us in suspense for the reveal. If Monster Island does anything, it functions reverently, and mostly endearingly, within the boundaries of Saturday afternoon escapist features.

On the other hand, the monster is typical for films of this ilk in that it lacks the swift killer instinct it should possess, inevitably pausing to growl, bear its teeth and hiss in the face of its prey, thus allowing said prey to figure out a means of escape or paw around in the periphery for an object to defend itself with. The conclusion is maddeningly devoid of logic, playing out with an annoying level of unintelligence on the part of its surviving humans, and fudging details for the sake of twists and fakeouts. And even then, it unfolds without any true surprises. Such are the less endearing traits of the lesser escapist features.

Tonally, the film takes itself a touch too seriously for a movie in which a man in a scary costume chases people through a jungle. But as Godzilla Minus One did for its Japanese war-vet protagonist, it also allows for a thoughtful portrayal of Saiko’s psychological journey from suicidal to committed to survival. And if one is fully committed, one might turn up some subtext about how forces of nature are always and forever greater than petty human squabbles over who owns what chunk of land – but this is a reach, and doesn’t quite hold together, because it’s not like the creature is a tornado that’s essentially nuke-proof.

But Monster Island is ultimately a fun, mostly honorable throwback homage to its many influences. It’s sometimes a bit janky in its editing, and the opening war-kablooey sequence is a mess of ugly CGI, but Wiluan quickly makes up for it by transitioning to location shoots, prosthetics and gobs of corn-syrupy gloop – it’s forever better for things to be made with human hands and tactile materials than soulless, flimsy-looking computer animation. Keep in mind, we should always adjust expectations for movies that hop directly from the genre-festival circuit to Shudder, where Monster Island will find an appreciative and forgiving audience. Warm fuzzies all around, then.

Our Call: Monster Island is good. Well, at least good enough for the niche it inhabits. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.