Mystery on Monster Island (1981)

Better Late Then Never

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

This is the movie of my childhood. Everything was so colorful with beautiful landscapes of desert island, predictable, scary creatures, monsters, guys behind the masks and the bad guy in the middle, pulling all the strings. Of course, there is a beautiful girl in the very end, who comes as the reward for heroic action of the main character. I just love happy endings, where happy couple proves that love between man and a woman is the only thing which matters on this world.

And todays new word is "D R O S S."dross |drôs; dräs| noun something regarded as worthless; rubbish : there are bargains if you have the patience to sift through the dross. • foreign matter, dregs, or mineral waste, in particular scum formed on the surface of molten metal.There is no mystery on mystery island. The 'monsters" are as scary as inflatables seen in a cheesy parade. Acting is subpar and the script, below what you'd run across in student projects.Go away. Save the 90 minutes for something worthwhile.........like a root canal.

Let me begin by saying that I had read Jules Verne's original source novel BEFORE seeing this movie... and the source is NOT "The Mysterious Island", as most of the would-be intellectuals who reviewed the film would make you believe.While "L'Ile Mysterieuse" ("The Mysterious Island") was written in 1874, the source of this film is actually "L'École des Robinsons" (which could be translated as "The Robinson School"), first published in 1882... and the entire "plot twist" criticized by the others before me is actually Jules Verne's original idea... it seems he used the "plot twist" before M. Night Shyamalan! Seriously, people... this is a fantasy, a farce, lighten up! Jules Verne himself was winking at his readers throughout the pages of his novel, and the movie only took it further. Since I knew the source of the film, it was a great fun ride to watch a retelling by a director who thought his viewers would laugh with him, not at him (probably just as foolishly as Ed Wood, but that's another story!) I enjoyed this bizarre flick, it was just as fun as some Russian fantasy movies I'd seen as a child, except that it had the brazen attitude of a more adult-oriented fare, but without becoming a "Gwendoline"...Also, movies are not created and do not exist in a void. When this film was released, in 1981, the era of the blockbuster was not yet upon us, Reagan and Thatcher had just been sworn in, and the Cold War was entering its fourth decade, flaring up again... The great era of the '70s, which had given us so many introspective and serious movies, was over, and people felt they needed more comedies, even hysterical comedies. It all probably started with "Airplane!" in 1980, and the ball just rolled on. There was at least one other title that came out in 1981, blending comedy, spoof and horror as a perfect companion for "Monster Island" - I'm thinking of "Saturday the 14th"... All in all, the criticisms leveled here don't surprise me. Truly, it's probably not the kind of film appreciated in the U.S. culture.

OK, I watched 20'000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, and CAPTAIN NEMO AND THE UNDERSEA CITY, and they were good. But this one is pretty poor. Yet it was kind of silly, and a little cartoonish. The professor gets hit, and you here a "Buh-oooiii-iiinnnggg" kind of noise (hey I heard that noise in SESAME STREET). The monsters in this film are pretty bad and lame. You see beasts that look like a combination between the gill man and a baboon. A big monster that looks like a combination between an allosaurus and a gorilla (how did they do that, a man in a suit, a robot)?Weird. Glops of sea weed that come to life. It looks like a bunch of SIGMUND AND THE SEA MONSTERS rejects. And caterpillers that blow steam. I thought this was a "creatures from lost worlds" kind of fantasy, but at the end, everything was joke island. The music in certain scenes like the chase scenes with the thieves sounded like cartoon music of the early 80's. The set where the hero and company were chased in a cave resembles the cave from the 1960 remake of THE LOST WORLD. Since the movie was called JULES VERNE'S MYSTERY ON MONSTER ISLAND, how come you see beautiful birds or harmless monkeys. I was expecting some prehistoric life forms. As Blockbuster Video Movie Guide says, "stick to MYSTERIOUS ISLAND". This film (like KING KONG ESCAPES) is not available on video, but you can tape it on the Sci-Fi channel.