Pinata Survival Island
zero stars
DVD
Directed by
David Hillenbrand
Scott Hillenbrand
Written by
David Hillenbrand
Scott Hillenbrand
Nicholas Brendon .... Kyle
Jaime Pressly .... Tina
Garrett Wang .... Paul
Eugene Byrd .... Doug
Kasey Fallo .... Monica
Nate Richert .... Jake
Lara Boyd Rhodes .... Lisa
Ed Gale .... Piata
Julia Mendoza .... Carmen
Daphne Duplaix .... Julie
Aeryk Egan .... Larry
Robert Tena .... Bob
Tressa DiFiglia .... Connie
Syante Villa .... Shaman
Manny Twofeathers .... Piata Maker
R
85 min
Pinata: Survival Island is the story of college students gone wild, and pinatas gone bad--pinatas with HEARTS, no less.
The
story, convoluted as it is, goes something like this: Ancient Mayans or
Aztecs or Incans or what have you were getting a little too evil for
their own good, and thus the evil in the village was taken out of them
and put into a pinata that remained undisturbed for several hundred or
even thousand years. If the pinata ever broke, the evil within it would
be unleashed.
And you know that that evil will not want to play canasta when it gets out.
All
is going well, too...until the drunken college kids show up for a Cinco
de Mayo party and scavenger hunt. Scavenging what, you ask? Why, it's
perfectly obvious when you realize what kind of movie we're dealing
with here--they're scavenging underwear.
It was, in retrospect,
a pretty bad idea to tell these bloated-liver, underwear hunting,
future cirrohsis carriers that there was free tequila hidden inside
pinatas on an island where a demonic pinata is just waiting to be
broken open so it can kill again.
You know the temptation to
break open every single pinata they can find, including the evil one
that looks like something out of a nasty horror movie, must have been
and in fact WAS insurmountable. And of course, the killing begins in
spades, with blood spattered on every flat surface around.
[BB]
I
hesitate to "yadda-yadda" movies, but this is one of them. I can't
BELIEVE how awful a retread this one is. It's like Deadly Species all
over again, except whoever wrote this slop thought that adding an evil
pinata would somehow make it all original!
It continues on for
an hour and a half or so, along with several murders that redefine the
term "overkill", until we get ourselves to the truly mystifying ending
to all this.
Do you want to know just how this awful slop ends? Do you?
THEY THREW A MOLOTOV COCKTAIL AT IT.
The
worst part is this, and I'm not kidding: they really killed the giant,
evil, ceramic pinata by setting it on fire. This makes no sense. This
follows no rational, reasonable, coherent chain of events. I don't even
know where to begin describing how wrong this is.
But
anyway...after that garbage winds down, we have extra features. We have
Spanish subtitles, so that Spanish speakers can be TWICE as offended by
this nightmare of a film. We also have trailers for Pinata Survival
Island, Bark, and Revelation. And as if that weren't enough, we have
audio settings, commentary, cast bios, filmmaker bios, a segment on the
Chiodos who made the pinata effects, a trivia game that brings new
meaning to the term "trivial pursuit," because that's exactly what it
is, and production stills.
So all in all, Pinata Survival Island
is just one more piece of garbage in the overswelling landfill that is
most of the direct to video industry. Shovelreel, anyone?
Tags:
Movies Movie Video horror Film evil IT DVD 
