Magic Island (1995)

Posted on May 09, 2007 under Fantasy, Kidvid |

Directed by Sam Irwin
Written by Neil Ruttenberg and Brent Friedman
Starring
- Zachery Ty Brian
- Edward Kerr
- Lee Armstrong
- Andrew Divoff
- French Stewart
Produced by Albert Band and Debra Dion
Executive produced by Charles Band

Magic Island is one of the latter films produced domestically (well, in Mexico) by Moonbeam Entertainment, before that label crumbled when Charles Band and Paramount parted ways. Given the pirate mania that’s taken over pop culture now, a decade later, it’s a pity that continued wrangling at Paramount could keep it from getting a DVD re-release, as it would probably clean up on the sell-through racks. That’s entirely based on subject matter, mind, and not on the quality of the feature itself; I don’t think anyone who’s seen it will cry when they find that Magic Island isn’t readily available for purchase. It isn’t as offensively bad as some kidvid I could cite, but it’s certainly no better than lackluster.

This, despite the star power on display! Zachery Ty Brian, in the middle of his nine-year role on TV’s Home Improvement, stars as Jack, a boy in the middle of a domestic situation so overused as to be worn nearly through. His father isn’t in the picture (no one says whether through divorce or death, only that Dad’s absence Makes People Sad), and his mother (Schae Harrison) is a professional woman at the point where the demands of her career on her time cut into her quality time with Jack. Being the only child of a professional, Jack has every material convenience he could want: stereos, videogames, heavy metal CDs, and even a subspecies 2 poster on his bedroom wall. But of course, what he really wants is luv.

Sitcom stars. They’re so standoffish.

Oh, I forgot his other great asset: a Wise Ethnic Domestic, specifically a pseudo-Jamaican housekeeper and general babysitter named Lucretia (Ja’net DuBois). She’s the one who makes him dinner when Mom has to work late; she’s the one who gives him the “Your mother really loves you, she’s hurting too” speech. She’s also the one who stands in his way when he tries to sneak out. I can’t be sure whether he was attempting to run away, or merely go get into trouble; the note he left for his mother might be evidence of the former, but the assortment of goods he packs in his small dufflebag, from a CD player to a Super-Soaker, seems more a random selection of possessions than the luggage of a runaway. (Usually, by age thirteen, boys have at least a dim awareness of the importance of packing clean underwear.)

Heading him off at the door, Lucretia instead gives Jack something precious: a book. I missed a lot of the dialogue in this scene because I was too busy quoting the “In my day, television was called ‘books!’” dialogue from The Princess Bride (1987), but apparently this book, The Magic Island, was written by Lucretia’s distant ancestor in Jamaica. (Though this certainly isn’t an original edition.) Jack dutifully takes the book back to his room, intending to ignore it, but as he’s trying to go to sleep, he starts hearing the dialogue from the pages, and it’s only a few seconds more before he’s sucked physically into the book.

He lands on the beach of a tropical island. Or rather, he lands on the head of the fearsome pirate Blackbeard, knocking him cold. He’s interrupted an altercation between good pirates and bad pirates, the latter of which had the upper hand until his arrival. Our roll call:

Good: Prince Morgan (Edward Kerr), a minor member of British royalty who took up buccaneering for the sake of adventure. Kind of vapid, but he’s got incredible hair.

Kermit the Frog, after exposure to the Gamma Bomb.

Good: Gwyn (Lee Armstrong), Morgan’s fiesty right-hand woman, who can best most men with a sword, and hails from Ireland (which means that, in contrast to the poor English accents affected by most of the cast, she’ll be presenting us with a bad Irish accent).

Good: Dumas (Oscar Dillon), a big black bodybuilder who doesn’t own a shirt. In a bit of characterization which I hope wasn’t an intentional reference to the cinema of the early 20th century, Dumas is the one who always knows about superstitions and magical lore, and is most likely to take supernatural explanations seriously.

Bad: Blackbeard (Andrew Divoff), a somewhat blustering pirate captain with an inflated sense of his own competence.

Bad: Supperstein (French Stewart — the star power just keeps growing!), an overly fastidious member of the pirate crew who wouldn’t last a day on a real pirate ship before becoming someone’s girlfriend.

Bad: Jolly Bob (Sean O’Kane) and Duckbone (Abraham Benrubi), two almost interchangeable crewmembers who mostly run into things and get hurt.

And what are they all doing here? Why, this magic island — known as “The Magic Island” — is the reputed last resting place of the sorcerer Carbassas, who protected his tombful of riches with a variety of magical defenses. Morgan has a map which should help his friends find the treasure, and of course Blackbeard wants it. So these small handfuls of treasurehunters are determined to outwit one another to the treasure, while the pirate’s ship and other crewmembers stay cheaply offshore.

“Arr! I hear that coconut milk makes for good conditioner!”

Jack is immediately hailed as a sorcerer himself, and is thus recruited by the side whose efforts he aided by knocking Blackbeard out. And what follows is… mostly an hour of running around the island from one peril to another, most of which are conquered by Jack’s ingenuity (or by something he just happened to have in his duffle bag, which came with him). The book, too, proves marginally helpful, in that Jack can look ahead to see what comes next in the story - but only one page at a time, the rest being blank. Actually, I take that back; what the book tells them is rarely very helpful at all.

Along the way, Jack picks himself up a galpal; when he falls into the water offshore, an adolescent mermaid named Lily (Jessie-Ann Friend) scoops him up. Then, because mermaids get a wish every time they rescue a human (what, you didn’t know that?), she wishes to have legs because she wants to go on the adventure. And yes, a chaste grass skirt appears along with the legs. Lily can also communicate with both animals and plants, meaning that the buccaneers could easily ditch Jack and get along well enough with just Lily.

Training shells.

It’s pretty clear that the inspiration for this movie, witting or not, is The Wizard of Oz (the 1939 feature, not the original book): a youth in conflict with his parental figure(s) is transported to a magical land where said youth undertakes a quest and makes fantastic friends, all to realize upon arriving home that home is the best place to be. But Magic Island is too disjointed to develop anything like the themes and character arcs which make The Wizard of Oz not only an immortal movie, but much better than its source material; Magic Island instead lurches from episode to episode until things are all done, and when Jack ends up back home (waking, naturally, as if from a dream), his change of attitude toward his mother has no link to anything that takes place on the magic island. It’s as if the original draft of the screenplay was assembled by committee who used their available technical resources to justify each scene (”Hey, we can get Mark Rappaport to make a ’sand shark’ handpuppet!” “And we can get Joel Fletcher to do a big stop-motion stone guardian!”), but no one stopped to ask, “And what’s the point of it all?” before embarking on a second draft. The closest thing to a unifying theme in this movie is the running gag of characters being knocked unconscious; it happens four times (!) to Blackbeard, plus once each to Jolly Bob, Duckbone, and the stop-motion stone guardian. The overall effect is to make the movie seem like an infomercial promoting head trauma.

“Angkor Wat!”
“Why are you asking me?”
(Thank you! I’ll be here all week!)

I do need to note, however, that the underlying deficiencies in the movie can be spackled over with the right among of spectacle. I watched the movie with my kids, and apparently the line between “Boy, this is cool!” and “This makes no sense whatsoever” is somewhere between ages nine and twelve. When you factor in the realization that your humble reviewer is not in fact a member of the target demographic for this kidvid, one has to judge it as being fairly successful at what it sets out to do.