Deep-Sixed

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE ISLAND

Directed by Michael Ritchie

Screenplay by Peter Benchley

The temptation in describing a film like this one is to string together several adjectives--witless, ugly, brutal, insensate, stupid. But one word will serve to cover its multitude of sins: The Island is simply vile.

Peter Benchley has adapted his soft core sadomasochistic novel, which offers an explanation for all those ships that supposedly disappear in the Bermuda Triangle. He suggests that on one of the out islands is an entirely unmerry band of buccaneers, living by a squalid code unchanged since their ancestors washed up there a couple of centuries ago. It is they who come out of the night to rob and murder unsuspecting voyagers, then sink their ships to conceal the evidence of piracy. Michael Caine plays a reporter who is investigating the Triangle. On a fishing trip, he and his son are captured by these physically and morally repellent people. Caine is required to revitalize the stock in this inbred clan. His son (Jeffrey Frank) is considered by the pirates' leader (David Warner) to be his potential heir. It matters little to the pirates that the boy must be brainwashed and then encouraged to kill his father in order to prove his right to that dubious distinction.

What follows is the systematic degredation of Caine, who spends most of the picture in chains, enduring all kinds of physical, psychological and sexual torments, while powerlessly watching as his son is turned against him. As if that were not enough, he must also suffer the punishing consequences of a series of failed escape attempts. The movie's dialogue consists largely of grunts and ughs, to which sensible viewers may want to add a kind of choral effect of their own. Needless to say, the picture ends in a bloodbath that might startle Sam Peckinpah.

It will doubtless be argued that there have been other films as bloody and violent as The Island, but most of them have been linked, however tenuously, to some observable reality or existing moral ugliness. But these pirates have no relation with common experience. They cannot even be defended, like the great white shark Benchley invented for Jaws, as projections of a deep-rooted unconscious fear. They carry no symbolic weight, and can be seen only as the figments of a desperately groping but entirely inept imagination--a hack's fever dream. It is difficult to see why anyone would volunteer money to watch this film, but it is harder still to understand why grown men would want to devote a year of their lives to making it.

--By Richard Schickel

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