Rating: 
Summary: Manifestions and the Menacing MealWorm
Review: Welcome to Hart Island, New York, home of almost a million of the disenfranchised dead. Here, inmates toil amongst the endless streams of bodies that fill the labelless confines of this vast potter's field, working off short-term sentences in ways that involve unceremoniously hauling the cheaply boxed deceased in dump trucks, digging mass graves for these individuals, and then conveyor-belting in the dead. Today, however, there are other events transpiring on the island that go beyond the atypical, because the almost-billionare Rupert King (Malcolm McDowell) has decided that this would be the perfect sight for his new project, Hope Island. Here, the poor would find themselves housed in accommodations that seem at first questionable and later a bit more sinister, providing them with nameless jobs and the "helping hand" they deserve. And everything seems to be going well for his venture, too, until the dead decide to thrown in their proverbial two cents on the topic in ways that seething with disdain.Island of the Dead had many things that seemingly made it viewable in the beginning, including the casting of McDowell and some support characters like Mos Def that prodded the story along as they were introduced into a setting that seemed particularly horrifying; with shadowy buildings of forgotten internment camps and asylums dotting an otherwise barren island of lost souls. Still, it began to disappoint as the storyline dragged its heels in the sands of multiple fragmentations that didn't mesh with any consistency as the movie tried to move forward and as the dead began to make their presence known. Still, my main problem was not this, but the way the dead and their angst was handled. In fact, this was one of the worst parts of the film itself, with the angry souls manifesting themselves as flies and the ever-frightening mealworm and never truly doing anything save biting people they didn't seem to car for, infecting the person they've bitten, and then managing to use their bodies as fleshy hatcheries and making it decompose at an astounding rate. Going further into this problem, anytime these spirits decided to assail someone, the camera would do so from a jerky "fly cam" perspective that was bathed in blue and gave me something of a headache, with no reward manifesting itself for these woes that I felt. For this reason alone, considering that the movie's cast would only be considered support characters to the beasts stalking them, was a major reason I found it so unsettlingly bad and wouldn't recommend it to anyone save the bravest or most uninformed of souls.
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