Piñata: Survival Island (2002)

 

a.k.a. Demon Island

Director: David and Scott Hillenbrand

Screenplay: David and Scott Hillenbrand

Cast: Nicholas Brendon as Kyle; Jaime Pressly as Tina; Eugene Byrd as Doug; Casey Fallo as Monica; Lara Wickes as Lisa; Garrett Wang as Paul; Julia Mendoza as Carmen; Daphne Duplaix as Julie; Nate Richert as Jake; Aeryk Egan as Larry; Tressa DiFiglia as Connie; Robert Tena as Bob; Ed Gale as the Piñata

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Here, in the past, a piñata was not a friendly celebratory object to knock sweets from its fluffy insides. In the back-story setting up this film, a shaman in an ancient village struck with the plague believed it was caused by the villagers sins, and created a clay piñata to seal the curse within, even sealing within its hollow form a freshly sacrificed pig's heart to absorb all the tribe's evil. The most prominent thing for me about this film, even over certain lead cast members, is that the piñata is the creation of the Chiodo Brothers, a trio of siblings (Charles, Stephen and Edward Chiodo) who I know for Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988), their directorial horror film which was a production show their craft, from claymation to practical effects, in all its bizarre and wonderful fashion. Known for working on a variety of projects, their creation here is Survival Island's best part, as this sealed object was floated down the river by the villagers, celebrating with a good luck piñata closer to the modern day equivalent was created to celebrate this act. Unfortunately, being a slasher film with a supernatural slant, we know that, in 2001, the bad piñata will be found on an island by a group of bikini and swimming trunk clad young partiers.

On said island, a female sorority and a male fraternity are going face-to-face in a scavenger hunt. Consisting of acquiring as many men's and women's underwear as they can, scattered around, the rules do admittedly make no sense as one sorority and one fraternity member are handcuffed together to collect items, despite them being face to face to get the most undergarments from each other. The prize at least, a cash sum half given to charity but the other half to the winners, is worth the game, but has to be discarded quickly when someone confuses the bad piñata, found in the open, for one of the many tiny modern ones the group have hung off trees full of hotel sized bottles of liquor like tequila. There are enough people here to effectively call them most red shirts, and thus there will be a body count.

Evil or not, you would be pissed off if a guy hit your chest open with a rock and cracked your piñata form open. And whilst piñatas are not a cultural object in Britain, though can be bought in stores like Wilko in a form, it is significant that this premise is what it is though never explored, of a Latin American cultural object of the piñata being involved, an item especially in Mexican culture of significance, and symbolic in Catholicism of a symbol of sins broken by the blindfolded person's faith. With North Americans wandering this island, this could have been even as a lurid slasher movie a work subconsciously about those from the USA's colonial history finding themselves succumbing to a very angry artefact from the landmass' past. However this is a conventional late era slasher, told straight, and I will admit here this was a slasher film where their glee in picking people off felt weird. This is a trait I have always had with slasher films and especially with a gory one like this, where the vicarious pleasure is in very one dimensional archetypes being picked off, and not even in plot. Demon Island as most know it was a frequent visitor to the IMDB Bottom 100 list¹, the worst ever films, and was why I came to this. But it says much of how my tastes are unlike the mainstream and how bad cinema can be from this specific level, in that Survival Island is on a technical level is pretty standard and not the lowest in cinema. Paradoxically it is also not of interest for me in the slightest in terms of entertainment value, always the one who has preferred slasher films for their tangents than their plot tropes, which this has none of and is streamlined of.

Barring the two leads, hand cuffed together briefly and with bad blood over their past relationship, this has little personality for me barring how of the early 2000s this is. Most may know this, if not for its negative reputation, for Nicholas Brendon and Jaime Pressly as these leads, Nicholas Brendon already known for a key role in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV franchise, Jaime Pressly in 2005 reaching prominence as a key role in My Name is Earl, another popular television series. For a film with a ridiculous villain, a piñata demon, this is a dry horror film for me which just goes through the kills and plot beats with not much else, and the CGI used for the character even back then was a terrible decision for how dated it looked already at the time. Credit must be given to this film for one plot trope it swerves on, that the seniors running the game still take it seriously a Bob had been injured, even if the girl involved is ranting of a piñata demon bashing his head, and try to get everyone safely back to camp with intentions to leave. Horror films, let alone slashers, normally do not do this, and it is sad the film was not this smart or going to embrace the silly concept. What you get is the traditions of the slasher with the creation just in the kills, such as testicular trauma or the piñata cheating by pretending to be a normal one hung off a tree.

It cannot stop however that, with not a lot happening beyond the process of death after death, and the skeletal structure of the surviving cast trying to escape the piñata, this is a film which screams for a strange and silly work to have been created for the premise, but never did. This should have been closer to the Chiodo Brothers creation itself, getting the point of their role and making a monster appropriately exaggerated and mean looking even if most of their creation is sidelined with CGI instead. If this does have to be among one of the worst horror films ever made, the sin should be how much wasted potential even with this premise there was.

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1) As of August 17th 2022, Survival Island is no longer on the list. Its existence on there can be evidenced however in a review like the following, for Misan[trope]y, written on October 20th 2014 in a series of reviews about IMDB Bottom 100 denizens.