02/18/10 - Terminal Island

Terminal Island (1973, 88 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070782/

Another Weird Wednesday movie. I ended up going to this one not even knowing what the name or pretty much anything at all about the film.

Terminal Island was made in 1973 when apparently everyone thought the "end was near" or something. The film depicts an alternate timeline where the death penalty is repealed. Instead, California adopts a system where anyone convicted of first degree murder is shipped off to an island forty miles offshore. The movie shows what happens on this island.

The main problem with Terminal Island is that it has about twenty important characters. Or so it seems. The island has two distinct groups and the film follows one new arrival as she goes from one group to the other and then seeks vengeance on the first group. All in all, the film tries to create a bunch of different and unique personalities for all these murderers. Instead it creates just a bunch of people on an island with no personality at all. There's only about two characters that feel different than anyone else and that's the main bad guy and one girl who doesn't even talk. Everyone else just blends together and no one ends up being memorable at all.

The film is made to be fun and silly. For the most part it accomplishes this. I mean, all of the females were chosen for their looks as opposed to their acting prowess. So naturally the viewer gets some silly moments from this. However, on the whole, the characters are just boring and the failed attempts to make them interesting hurts the overall enjoyment of a lighthearted film.

A few other times in the movie there's just poor work done. Not often do I notice film framing problems in a movie but that's actually on display here. It's so bad that sometimes even the main action will be going on almost offscreen. A few other times it's just off enough to be disorienting. And other times, still, the whole color is washed off as if they threw that scene in without fully finalizing the necessary touch up work to make the scene fully presentable.

Overall, I gave this film a 2/10. There's really not much to say in my opinion. It has a pretty cool premise but just doesn't seem to get much right as it goes about telling its story. I didn't care about the characters at all and only a few times was the action fun and exciting.