UNCHARTED (2009)

I saw this movie on the new releases shelf at Hasting's this week and decided to give it a go on the basis of the cover art. For you see, there, on the DVD cover, sticking through a human skull, was a spear tipped with an actual stone point. It looked like the Ensor points found in Central Texas. Not much of a basis for choosing a movie, I know, but I'd already seen CRANK II, the only other decent New Release this week, and besides, how often do guys grab a movie for the sole reason that there is some woman with barely concealed breasts on the cover?

Anyhoo, this is the story of a college documentary crew looking for evidence of jaguars on an island off the coast of Mexico. Their plane crash-lands on an UNCHARTED island in one of the most busy waterways in the entire world, and the pilot wanders off in a drunken stupor. Three of the film crew follow him and simply disappear. One guy (Michael) stays with the plane to take care of the film's director (Lane), who bumped her head when the plane landed and was unconscious.

The pilot wanders in and out of the rest of the film. He disappears for hours at a time so we can be treated to the director and her chief cameraman having earnest conversations, bonding to each other, and finally having sex. Then he comes back to announce that A) the island is uncharted B), that help may not be coming, and C) he has just found the body of one of the missing film crew.

As for the other three film crew members, we see their story through flashbacks in the form of bits of film on the cameras recovered from the island. We learn that the redheaded chick is married to the long-haired blond guy, and that she is fond of showing off her new boobs. We learn that the Hispanic guy has a wife back home he is deeply in love with, and that he wants the film to be a huge commercial success so he can buy her a Jaguar (and the documentary is about jaguars, catch the irony?) And we also learn that there are carnivorous creatures on the island, barely glimpsed and poorly rendered with CGI, that have killed everybody except Lane and Michael.

Finally, at the end, when the sole survivor is rescued by a passing cabin cruiser, we learn through flashbacks the SHOCKING SECRET of the island's carnivorous inhabitants.

This film tried hard to work, but it took a LONG time to get going. I mean, I dozed off three times in the first fifteen minutes. Finally (about the time the redhead showed off her assets the first time) I woke up enough to finish the thing. Some of the moments were genuinely suspenseful. The CGI was truly awful, but it was minimal and only shown in a few scenes near the end. The denoument was reasonable satisfactory, but overall, this one was a bad movie that tried really hard to be good. Maybe with a bigger budget this director could turn out something better. But it was still better than the crappy SyFy original I watched last night.

So give it a shot. You might like it better than I did.