“The Island” from Eureka Entertainment and MVD Visual! Order Here!
Geography teacher Mr. Cheung faith in his student’s studies lacks encourage and their grades likely won’t improve. He decides to take his class on a field trip to an isolated island he once visited more than a decade ago as a young man. With the intended purpose of relaxation, Mr. Cheung refuses his students of mentioning any schoolwork and studies to try and enjoy the coasting waters and the native nature the island has to offer. However, there’s more than just animals and plants inhabiting the island as a family of three eccentric brothers welcome them with strange behavior and creepy vibes. When the younger brother selects one of the student girls as his bride to carrier on their lineage, the once ideal getaway traps Mr. Cheung and his students without a way of escaping the irrational whims and delusions of the three brothers. With a retrieval boat still a day out, the cornered teacher must keep his party alive at all costs.
Considered Hong Kong’s answer or version of the backwoods pursuers of cutoff society people, 1985’s “The Island” secludes normal kids and their acquiescent teacher on an island where inbreeding has corrupted the copies of three brothers who’ve recently interred their adamant mother to rest and who’ve been searching for mainland women suitable to be the unsterile youngest’s wife. Leung Po-Chi, or Po-Chih Leong, director behind “He Lives By Night” and “Hong Kong 1941,” produces a Jekyll-and-Hyde contrasting tale that’s sad and bleak to the core with a script not pinpointed to one particular writer but rather to a creative team within the production company D & B Films, aimed to capitalize on the western grim nature of the deranged and callous upon the unsuspecting and innocent seen in such exploitation and other B-pictures as Hong Kong shifts from the longstanding yet now waning Kung-Fu pictures. Dickson Poon, Sammo Hung Kam-Bo, and John Sham, the founders of D & B Films, produce the film.
John Sham may not be the ideal looking or sounding hero with a receiving hairline close to Three Stooges’ Larry Fine, thick, round spectacles, and about as average build of a middle-aged man as they come, but for “The Island” the ‘Yes! Madam” actor and D & B Films’s cofounder is suitable and ideal to be the pliantly, run-of-the-mill geography instructor looking to leave the woes of education behind him for a chance to revisit a place from his youth. Unfortunately, Sham’s inadvertently the head of the snake as everyone remembers the exposed poisonous fangs threateningly elongated from with out the jowls underneath the reptilian beady and glowing eyes. No one really remembers the slithering body unless there’s a warning rattle connected at the end. That’s how the rest of the student body reproduces in trying to portray characters to care about but not really achieving the level of sympathy needed to rise about that film of understanding. One of the more prominent kids is Phyllis, labeled the chunkier one by youngest aggressive, the snotty-simpleton Sam Fat (Billy Sau Yat Ching, “Scared Stiff”) and she’s targeted for Sam Fat’s procreation affections. Played by Hoi-Lun Au, Phyllis has a working but tiffed relationship with Ronald (Ronald Young, “Sex and Zen III”) and see the untimely death of Ronald sends Phyllis into seeing red, being a formidable survival combatant against the remaining Fat brothers Tai (Lung Chan, “Encounter of the Spooky Kind”) and Yee (Jing Chen, “Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky”). Billy Sau Yat Ching, Lung Chan, and Jing Chen are distinctly diverse to the best possible way, and each deliver their own dish of crazy that gives “The Island” an inescapable locked inside a padded cell substructure all too familiar on its base componentry but alien enough to master a new diverging kind of terror. Che Ching-Yuen, Chan Lap-Ban (“Hex After Hex”), Kitty Ngan Bo-Yan, Lisa Yeun Lai-Seung, and Timothy Zao (“Diary of the Serial Killer”) costar in the relatively fresh faced and unknown at the time casted film.
Leung Po-Chi wets our whistle with an opening of an intense forced marriage ceremony involving shuddering sexual exploitation and personal space invasive mistreatment of a mainland young woman, a swimmer who swam her way into trouble with the island’s inhabitants – an elderly mother and her three disturbed sons with the goal of using her for breeding a new bloodline. This ultimately sets up the tone for a bleaker story that tells of nihilist cruelty with a thematic division between the urban educated and the unsophisticated rural folk, in this case the rural Bumpkins are isolated island inhabitants, but then Leung switches gears with a lighthearted introduction of frolic scurrying teacher and his students as they spread amongst the island’s sandy beaches wearing brilliantly colored skin tight swimsuits and bask in the island’s natural beauty with a couple of them going tangent into their own personal secondary storylines. Those subplots never vine out and upward to flower fully but there’s enough stem and leafing groundwork between the good old gay times and a few individual internal affairs to setup sympathy for at least a select few as the relationship between visitors and residents quickly sours with Sam-Fat’s eyes growing bigger and bigger and his drool becoming slobbery and slobbery for Phyllis. There’s not a ton of autonomy for the brothers who do their mother’s bidding long after she expires, committing themselves to the original plan of marrying off Sam-Fat in a show of take and force that robs Mr. Chueng’s dual purpose plan of a good time of fun and nostalgia. Leung acutely abrupt faces again, back to the cruel inklings from the beginning, that displays unsettling camera shots, dark and low-warmth lighting, and a ferocity that’s always been with the brothers now more evident and growing inside the remaining survives who must fight for each other as well as themselves. Leung’s style feels very much like a blend between the quick editing and fast action of a martial arts production but has the lighting and chaos-laden horror of an Italian video nasty that does see and lingers onto blood spilled.
“The Island’s” a terror-riddled getaway that has arrived onto a new Blu-ray from UK label Eureka Entertainment routed through North American distributor MVD Visual. For the first time on the format outside of Asia and as part of the company’s Masters of Cinema series (#324), Eureka’s Special Edition release is AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition resolution, BD50 and presented in the original widescreen aspect ratio 1.85:1. With a brand new 2K restoration scan, “The Island” has impeccable quality measure that emerges the most minute details in every frame. Skin tones have inarguable organic quality and a true-to-form reactionary sweat-gleam look induced when the chase is on. The textures pop through in garb, foliage, and in dilapidated structure that gives certain discernibility and depth of object. The original print has virtually no wear or tear as well as any aging problems, appearing to be a fresh off the reel transfer with natural appeasing grain. The original Cantonese mono track is the only track available and is really the only mix we could expect and receive without a remastering, but, in all fairness, the mono works well enough to satisfy dialogue, ambient, and soundtrack integrity in its limited fidelity box Dialogue is clean and clear on the encoding with no damage or other verbal obstructions but the modulation favors the antiquate characteristics of the era and the paralleling ADR offers little synchronous value, both to not fault of Eureka. The optional, newly translated English subtitles by Ken Zhang pace well and are in flawless transcription. The special edition is encoded with a new commentary with East Asian film expert Frank Djeng, a second new commentary by genre connoisseurs Mike Leeder and Arne Venema, a 2023 interview with the director Po-Chih Leong Surviving the Shoot, East Asian film expert Tony Rayns provides an appreciation video essay Tony Rayns on “The Island,” and the film’s trailer. The limited-edition set comes with a red and yellow pastel colored O-card slipcover with new beaitfully illustrated artwork by horror graphic artist Ilan Sheady, whose supplied extreme and gory “Terrifier” franchise artwork to European media books, and delivers “The Island” a warm glaze of trouble-in-paradise, capturing the essence of what to expect from the story. Original poster art graces the clear Amaray façade with a sepia image of John Sham from the opening scenes on the reverse side. The limited set also includes a 19-page color booklet containing photos of “The Island” as well as other Leong productions, cast and crew credits, To Genre and Back: The Cinema of Po-Chih Leong program notes by Roger Garcia for a strand celebrating Po-Chih Leong at the 2023 Far East Film Festival, an interview with the director conducted by Roger Garcia All Within the Same Film: An Interview with Po-Chih Leong, and bring up the booklet’s rear are viewing notes and release credits. The not rated feature has a runtime of 93 minutes and is region A/B locked for playback.
Last Rites: Director Po-Chih Leong’s trip to “The Island” is beyond bleak in social commentary and in of dire situation of nothing but pure innocence being destroyed by those left forgotten on the outskirts of mainlanders and of sanity. Eureka Entertainment’s Blu-ray honors “The Island” with praise upon praise for its slick high-definition picture, solid extras, and beautifully designed O-slipcase and design.
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