Isla endemoniada

from the very first frame of this 'movie' you can see you're watching some thing extraordinary. the introduction is so over the top you don't know if to laugh or cry. it's like a parody of the discovery channel, if you will.

on with the show. the lights turn on, the camera dives to sea level and shows us the usual pack of screaming American teenagers, this time travelling to gather underwear from a desert island (!). well, the island is not completely deserted, the two judges of the whole thing are waiting for the youth. the competition gets away, and everything goes fine, everyone looks pretty and is very cool (pot! ooh!). there's just this one little problem. the island they stormed into features a giant pinata, who gets pretty pis*ed off seeing all those screaming teens. my guess is the pinata was just trying to tell them to shut the he*l up so it could go back to sleep, but since the kids just scream more when they see it, it has no choice but to crack their skulls wide open and stuff their guts in there. tragic. tragic, indeed.

the computer animated pinata is a retarded idea in it self, but the horrible animation makes it even more hilarious. the actors aren't actually too bad, if not good either. the shaky spice goes a little over the top in her acting.

this movie has it all. pretty girls, tropical island, a miserably funny mtv-predator, a little gore even, the fact it all starts when the kids smoke pot, funny acting, stupid music, survivors feel, mcguyver end battle...it's horror but for all the wrong reasons, it's comedy...intended? perhaps, perhaps, not. it's trash, but it's fun, anyway!

College co-eds are stalked by an evil pinata in a tropical paradise! A premise like that could be the makings of a cult classic.

Alas, "Pinata: Survival Island" seems neither inspired nor clumsy enough to reach that status. The film DOES qualify as an obscure horror hoot, especially in the early scenes of the wicked pinata's reign of terror.

"Buffy"'s Nicholas Brendon is always a welcome presence, but there's little to his role here, compared with your average BtVS rerun.

Poor Nicholas Brendon. While his other Buffy castmates get to do theatrical films he is stuck in this straight to video abomination so awful everyone involved should actually be ashamed. The monster is particularly embarrassing--a computer generated thing that looks like it stepped out of a video game and almost never interacts with the live actors, making it seem even more fake. The idea of a killer Pinata might have offered some campy fun if the thing actually looked like a Pinata. The only film I've seen recently that was comparably dreadful was House of the Dead, which I actually walked out of when I was foolish enough to pay and see it in a theater. Movies like this really make you long for the return of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

...one of the worse movies ever made. It's so incredibly stupid that actually after a nice blunt or two you might even have fun with it. 1/10 (2/10 if you count this "underwear collecting contest" for a fresh idea)

Thankfully, I didn't waste my money renting this movie, I watched it on cable instead, where it was part of the AMC Friday night "Frightfest" line-up. The only thing I seem to have wasted was my time and my last remaining brain cell.

However, I think the cable channel mistook this movie for a "horror" film where it should have been more appropriately slotted between an airing of "AIRPLANE II" and "STEWARDESS SCHOOL".

My curiosity to see this movie spiked when I discovered that Xander from "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" was starring in it. The first chuckles came when the credits list him as a "Producer", followed by the blatant rip off of the opening credits from the movie "THE THIRTEENTH WARRIOR".

But never mind that, after you get past the hilarious introduction which shows how the evil piñata is created, the movie kicks into overdrive as we flash forward to the present day where a group of frat kids are heading to an island for an underwear scavenger hunt! I kid you not, some people actually spent a lot of time and effort to think up this highly original plot.

I for one was expecting something similar to Nicholas Brendon's last beach horror movie, "PSYCHO BEACH PARTY" which turned out to be a rather amusing camp trash mini-classic. Apparently, Brendon was looking to steer himself in a more "serious" direction and decided to leave the laugh track behind.

Unfortunately, the laugh track follows him to this particular movie as well, but for all the wrong reasons. All of the characters are incredibly annoying, so you're just praying that this piñata thing shows up really fast so it can start the bloodshed. And when it finally does show up, that is when the real laughter begins!

I haven't laughed this hard since, well, "PSYCHO BEACH PARTY"! The piñata looks like it was created on someone's home computer, a Commodore 64 perhaps. You can't help but laugh when you see it's eyes glow orange and you suddenly get to see through "Pinata vision" which is apparently a poor attempt at copying "PREDATOR", but this time, we get to see its victims as orange triangles stacked on top of each other (LOL).

I agree with another user's comment here, before seeing this movie, I was picturing some sort of papier-mache donkey that is brought to life and goes on some sort of a killing rampage. Watching this particular "piñata" running around clubbing people to death with a yard stick was too hilarious for words.

There is one scene that involves a dirt buggy crashing into a log and "blowing up". The 'explosion' graphics look like they were spliced right out of a video game. In fact, I don't even think they used a "green screen" when filming this particular scene as it looks like they transferred a CGI "fireball" from the early-90's computer game "DOOM" directly onto the film - the graphics don't even match the surrounding scenery and the flames overlap the trees! They must have had a lot of good times while filming this. I could picture the director shouting to the girl, "Now fly through the air like you're dodging a fireball!", the girl trying to keep a straight face while improvising at the same time.

The acting is also in a field of its own. If you want to call what these actors are doing, "acting" - there is a scene where one girl is picking underwear off a roped line and decides to skip a few for no reason. The whole point of them being there is to COLLECT AS MANY PAIRS OF UNDERWEAR AS YOU CAN - which would probably also explain why one of the guys also decides to leave several boxers pinned to a bush. Priceless!

The worst actor out of all of them was the one handcuffed to Nicholas Brendon - Jaime Presley. I had to click on her name to see what else she had been in and was not surprised at all to see that most of it had either gone straight-to-video or was a small cameo in a two-bit television show on UPN.

The dialog was downright embarrassing. When Nicholas Brendon tries to impress Jaime Presley at the beginning of the movie by explaining the history of "Cinco de Mayo" after everyone else at the table had passed for stupidity, I just burst out laughing. This movie was simply awful!

Also, when did they change the name of this movie to "DEMON ISLAND"? Is this a laughable attempt at trying to rename the film to trick people into seeing it after the bad word of mouth gets around?

After watching this trash, one can only hope that someone would fill a real piñata with copies of this movie so we can all have a go at it with a wooden bat.

My Rating - 0 out of 10