Customer Reviews

Pinata: Survival Island

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(22)

 

 

With a cumbersome title created in order to lure in the reality show crowd, a movie called "Pinata: Survival Island" made me more than a little leery. I never watch those types of shows on television, and I have less reason to watch any movie that duplicates such silly antics. I decided to throw all caution to the wind and watch the film, and I found myself pleasantly surprised with the results. "Pinata" is definitely no Oscar contender, with its healthy dose of cheesy CGI special effects and occasionally corny dialogue, but an interested horror fan will find plenty to like with this movie.

We learn at the beginning of the movie that a little village located at some point in the distant past suffered through a season of terrible evil. A serious drought caused a marked decline in the food supply, resulting in malnutrition and several deaths. Following this unfortunate incident, a weird sickness claimed more lives. The people became desperate to solve their problems, so they turned to the local pottery artisan for help. In league with the village priest, this artisan began constructing a huge, wicked looking clay piñata. The plan involved using this creation to house the evil spirits sweeping through the village. Unfortunately for the village, it took a long time to build the piñata, and many people died before the artisan finally emerged from his little shack with the clay container. The priest and the artisan placed a fresh heart and some magic stones (I know; I groaned at the idea of "magic" stones, too) into the piñata, and then the village held a ceremony where the priest placed the sins of the people into the clay demon. The people set the piñata adrift in the "magic" river where lightening promptly struck the object, thus sealing the evil into the icon for an indeterminate amount of time. If you think this opening sequence reeks of cheese, you are right. It's groan worthy in the extreme, but it does set up the background for the massacre that's soon to follow.

Flash forward to Cinco de Mayo, 2001. A gang of twelve college kids heads to an island owned by their university in order to take part in one of those obnoxious fraternity/sorority activities we all hate. The idea is simple: a boy and girl are handcuffed together and must roam around the island collecting underwear. The pair with the most pairs of underpants wins a large sum of money for charity. A few piñatas placed strategically around the island contain little surprises for our hard drinking group of bubbleheads. Two of the kids, Kyle and Tina, are not happy about pairing up because they just broke up immediately before arriving on the island, but they are willing to go along with game for the sake of a good time. There is also a guy and girl who act as judges in the contest, so we now have a high possibility of a double digit body count when the sauce starts to fly, and believe me, the sauce flows darn quick in this movie. I really have no idea why the Mexican Independence Day serves as a major plot point of the film, but I guess it doesn't really matter. Any holiday of even trivial importance would serve as long as it supplies victims for the evil spirits in the piñata.

Within twenty or so minutes, one of the girls discovers a huge clay piñata floating in the water. Thinking this object must be one of the prizes the judges told everyone about, this girl and her guy partner break the thing open with a rock. The nightmare begins, as the piñata morphs into a killer entity with an otherworldly rage. The kids drop at regular intervals in scenes that are surprisingly ultra gory. The demon (there's no better term for what this creature is) beats in heads with sticks and shovels, tears people apart with its hands, and generally makes a complete nuisance of itself. At some point, the thing becomes airborne and swoops around the island, roaring and thrashing its way through the rapidly dwindling collegians. Banding together to fight this enemy seems to do no good, as the creature picks off stragglers with ease. The predictable conclusion sees the survivors going on the offensive against the demon. At the very least, I thought the filmmakers would attempt to set up a sequel, but is doesn't look like this will happen-unless video rentals take in a good sum, of course.

The DVD contains several extras: cast bios, three trailers, and an interesting documentary about making the creature. Apparently, the filmmakers shot the whole movie using a guy in a rubber suit as the demon, but backed out of that idea when someone said it wasn't scary enough. The result involved inserting CGI effects in every scene in which the conventional special effect appeared. Personally, I thought the original idea wasn't all that bad, but what do I know about marketing a picture. These days, every film takes the easy way out and uses CGI, but in this case it just doesn't work as well here. Overall, "Pinata: Survival Island" isn't a bad movie, but it isn't great either. Jaime Pressly does what she can with her part, which isn't much. At least she has more to do than the rest of the cast, who disappear in particularly nasty ways quickly. Give this movie a shot if you like horror films, especially movies with a significant dose of cheese slathered on top.

Pinata (slapped with cheeseball title Survivial Island for video/dvd) isn't a good movie. It isn't scary and it isn't anything new. It is however, a lot of fun.

Broken down (and there's not a lot of plot details to brake down) a bunch of fraternity kids go to an island for an underwear scavenger hint and release a demon pinata which then proceeds to hunt them down. Sound stupid? It is.

So what's good here... well, quite a bit actually. There's a fairly solid cast. Nicholas Brendon (of Buffy fame) and Jaime Pressly make for likeable leads. Brendon in perticular has a charismatic and totally likeable presence. The direction is solid and there's some good scares and a few gruesome deaths for the gore fans.

The creature itself was originally shot with a little person in a suit which surprisingly, worked pretty well. The practical fx work are a good deal better then a lot of the digital ones. Many of the CGI effects are fairly lame and totally obvious but then again, if you're looking for ILM fx, direct to video horror movies probably aren't your films of choice. The creature's okay but would have worked better with more practical work and less hammy CGI.

There's some more utterly goofy moments in the film such as when a dead deer is found on the island... not sure if there are deer on tropical islands. I think not. Also, one of the characters describes when she first saw the creature in a ridiculous way. I challenge you not to smirk at the stupidity of her description.

Once again, not high class art here but if you're looking to have some goofy fun in the spirit of Killer Clowns from Outer Space... Pinata (here comes the lame play on words)is worth a crack.

This movie starts off nice, with a rather long sequence showing the creation of the evil pinata. It's rather "gothic" or at least a tad scary. Then fast forward to the present, with some rock 'n' roll, and a group of college students riding their boats out to an island.

It's your run-of-the-mill slasher flick as far as the plot.

The acting is rather above average for this sort of movie.

Overall, it's an enjoyable film. Nothing new here, but it moves along nicely.

You've got to feel sorry for Nicholas Brendon. A cast member of Buffy the Vampire Slayer since the show's debut, the poor guy gets casted in crud like this after the end of the series. Brendon, along with the smoking hot Jamie Pressly and a few other unlucky college kids, partake on some fun on a tropical island. The fun ends however, when a demon infested killer pinata comes to life and kills them off one by one. Yes, you read that last sentence right, a killer pinata. The CGI effects of the monster are beyond fake, and the CGI animated explosions that occur are deliriously bad. The acting is almost non-existant, along with the story, and the blood and gore is ridiculously lame looking. Everything about this movie is just plain awful, and fans of Buffy will feel for poor old Nick Brendon. Avoid at all costs.

I can't even believe I watched this movie. This is worse than awful, even for people who enjoy ultra-cheesy B-movies. The film begins with ludicrous narrative pontification on an ancient tribe in South America which was beset with a plague due to their sins; eventually a shaman put a pig heart in a pinata and in an elaborate ceremony set it loose. The narrator explains that all would be well as long as the "magically charged clay" was not disturbed.

After a jump cut to May 5, 2001 (Cinco de Mayo) we find a group of semi-attractive non-actors on an island. This is a college outing, but surprisingly features little skin, perhaps proving that ancient Aztec gods and bikinis don't mix. At any rate the group is broken into couples who are handcuffed together and are sent on what amounts to a scavenger hunt on the island for pre-positioned underwear. As if this could get any stupider, one couple immediately locates the demonic pinata, and, logically, breaks it open with a rock.

The demon turns out to look like a half pig-half terrifying devil monkey creature if it was rendered by a sock puppet. It is the worst single piece of CGI animation I have ever seen in my life, and if this doesn't make you involuntarily roll your eyes, you are not paying attention. The CGI devil pig thing sees with some kind of infrared vision that not only rips off "Predator" directly, but also reminded me of "Land of the Lost" when Enik was in the pyramid. Throughout the film there are bad and pointless flashbacks to earlier scenes, some of which are mere seconds old (in case you forgot), and the whole thing comes to a mystifying conclusion that is a cross between the end of "Ghostbusters" and a weaker episode of "Mod Squad."

In all truth, I can't think of a single good thing to say about this film, so I think I will conclude by strongly advising anyone against watching this movie for any reason. It is not scary, it is not funny, it is not campy, and it is not worth your time. It would, however, make an excellent Christmas gift for a bad movie aficionado who truly believes that they can watch and find some type of perverse joy in any film, no matter how poorly crafted. I bet they can't.

There is nothing like a good horror flick...And this was NOTHING like a good horror flick. If you like em bad this is your film. I won't bother explaining the origins of the Pinata because it is done twice in the film, the first in the opening credits for about 10 painfully long minutes. I saw the last 10 or so minutes on AMC and had to rent it based on the terrible effects which bounced from a 4 foot midget in a rubber suit to a ten foot glowing devil beast of some kind. By the end of the movie the creature was looking like something from Ghost Busters.
What I found really odd was this pinata was made of clay and about 4 feet tall. That said, every frat kid in the film recognized it as a pinata! It looked NOTHING like what pinatas look like to me. The worst part, and there are many, was when the kids hide behind a tree for several hours while the pinata is on the other side of the tree. There are many points in the film where the Pinata can see the people and appears to be about 10 yards from them. They, however, don't even know he is there even though he sounds like a feeding lion pride mixed with the tazmanian devil. I was planning on writing more but I am realizing that I have already spent too much time with this HORRIBLE film.

Many moons ago a pre-Columbian Central American community was suffering from a bad malaise. A tribal shaman created two life sized clay piñatas, one evil and one good. They loaded the evil piñata with all the bad vibrations afflicting them and tossed it into the sea. Many moons later it washed up on a deserted island a short distance off the California coast...
The island is the stage for a challenge between two fraternity houses. Think "Survivor" with younger and louder and more obnoxious contestants. Soon enough the kids awaken the evil spirit within the piñata and begin falling like ten-pins.
PINATA: SURVIVAL ISLAND is no sillier than movies of this type. It's predictable and the CGI graphics are awful. A short documentary on the dvd tells us that the computer generations were all done post-production, after the movie was filmed and it was decided that a clay pot didn't look menacing enough. It's too bad; the unadorned clay pot had a cheesy charm that the cracking, lava fill computer creation can't touch.
This is a good movie for the technophobes. For the first time in recent memory there are NO cell phones in a movie about teenagers. Inconvenient for the frat brats, though. Their boats are destroyed and it's a fifteen mile shark infested swim to the mainline.
The actors are competent enough, although it's a little painful watching them work against such a balky story. I was especially taken with pixie-ish Lara Boyd Rhodes, who played petrified terror as well as it can be played.

Pinata: Survival Island (David and Scott Hillenbrand, 2002)

Where I got the idea that this was another violent reality-show spoof a la Series 7: The Contenders is beyond me. I couldn't have been more wrong; this is a low-budget B-monster flick.

Now, I have never tried to hide my affection for monster movies under a basket. Some of the prides of my DVD collection are things like Kingdom of the Spiders and Shriek of the Mutilated. Give me something big, ugly, squirmy, and with murder in its eyes (and/or a taste for human flesh), and for the most part I'm good to go. This one, however, goes beyond the bounds of affectionately bad and well into the realm of "why on earth am I still watching this?"

As you can probably tell from the title, the evil-spirit-bad-guy is, in fact, a pinata. (They make 'em strong down there-- the unwitting and/or witless author of destruction has to break it open with multiple blows from a large rock.) Do you need more of a plot than "evil spirit reanimates, kills college coeds?" Nope. Said collegiates are, of course, of the young-and-beautiful variety, headed up by Nicholas Brendon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Jaime Pressly (Not Another Teen Movie).

The best low-budget monster movies aren't about the monsters, they're about the characters. (Take Frogs and its young hero Sam Elliott facing off against evil tycoon Ray Milland, for example.) The characters all have reasons, however flimsy, to be there, and are more than just dummies with "kill me" written on their foreheads. (It also helps when you can't tell who's going to survive within the first ten minutes of the movie.) Even the execrable, but ever so funny, Shriek of the Mutilated attempted to wrap its gore in some semblance of plot and character development. But not here; it's a bunch of college students who have come to an island to party. (Here I feel the need to note that even that's been done better in the recent past, albeit barely, in Club Dread.)

One wag on IMDB put in his review that "the Hillenbrand brothers know all the genre cliches, and they're not afraid to use them!" Indeed. *

"Pinata: Survival Island" is about a group of friends from a sorority and fraternity at Woodson College who go on an annual Cince De Mayo scavenger hunt. Like every other horror movie, all are having fun until one of the friends does something stupid. Thinking that they have just found a pinata filled with alcohol and other "prizes" two high partners open an ancient pinata that was used years ago to contain evil that was wreaking havoc on an Indian village. The rest of the film is like all the others in that the evil pinata, one-by-one, kills off the group of friends unti their are only two people left (of course it's the two that once dated each other and are struggling with being around each other). They have to fight the evil pinata and send the evil back to hell.

Even though the story is lacking, this film is very gory. I was very surprised by that. There is a scene where the pinata hits a girl over the head repeated with a shovel and you will be taken back by the gore. People with weak stomachs might want to skip this film. The CGI effects also run rampant through this film, almost to the point to where it's silly. The monster changes form and mutates so often that it seems like there is more than one monster running around the island.

Some may like this and some may not. I will leave that decision entirely up to you. However, for me it was a poor and silly attempt at a horror film.

If you think I am going to argue this is the worst movie ever made, then you obviously have not read my review of "Manos, the Hands of Fate" and you certainly have not seem the movie currently entrenched as the top, so to speak, of the IMDB's list of worst movies. Just sit right back and you will hear the tale of the fateful trip a group of Woodson University students take in "Pi'ata: Survival Island." Every year for Cinco de Mayo the fraternity and sororities have a competition on the island where the boys and girls are randomly cuffed together and then have to go off in search of 2,500 pairs of underwear strewn around the island (a 21st century version of the panty raid I guess); the winners get to split $20,000 with their houses. However, on the island there are also some pi'atas that have booze int them, because being randomly handcuffed to somebody of the opposite sex so that you can look for underwear on a tropical island is a lot more fun when you are drunk.

The problem is that when one pair of students, Bob (Robert Tena) and Lisa (Lara Boyd Rhodes), find this giant pi'ata they think they have found the big kahuna and try to break it open. The problem is that in former days, that is to say once upon a time on an island far, far away, a pi'ata Maker (Manny Twofeathers) and a shaman (Syante Villa) imprisoned evil spirits in the pi'ata (because imprisoning evil spirits in an object intended to be broken open is a good idea apparently) and let it float away to plague somebody else. Once the demon is free, it starts killing people and with each victim it gets bigger and badder.

The stars of the film are Kyle (Nicholas Brendon) and Tina (Jaime Pressly). The reason the students are randomly paired is so these two can be thrown together. They used to be a couple, so being handcuffed together is adding insult to injury, until people start dying and they decide loving each other is better than being dead. Other tag teams on the demon's menu include Monica (Casey Fallo) and Paul (Garret Wang), who are running the contest (somebody has to strew the underwear around), and Connie (Tressa DiFiglia) and Doug (Eugene Byrd). Not that names matter, because none of the characters are really developed beyond the basic stereotype of college Greeks. The exception that proves the rule would be Kyle, who prizes loyalty over intelligence when it comes to dealing with a killer pi'ata.

Now the problem with this film is not that there is no gratuitous nudity but that the actors think they are doing a serious horror film (that being a relative concept), but the monster looks like it escaped from a computer game. Brendon, Pressly and Rhodes play it straight, but the demon pi'ata is a joke. Unfortunately it is laughable but not in a good way. This movie was written, directed and produced by the Hillenbrand brothers, David and Scott, so there was no one in a position to stop them from doing what they want, and what they wanted was hokey CGI effects. At the very end of the movie when the cops want to know what happened the survivors have nothing to say, which you have to admit is an appropriate response given what happens in this film. I say this even though in the big fight to the finish at the end Kyle uses a frying pan (I have insisted for years that people being attacked in a kitchen can do serious damage with a frying pan, but they never use one and here Kyle uses one, even though he is not a kitchen, although it really should not work, so it is a mixed bag for me).

The working title for this 2002 film was "Pi'ata," and then they obviously decided that was not coming to scream "horror flick" to consumers, so them went with "Demon Island." Of course once people actually saw this movie they started referring to it as the killer pi'ata movie, which explains why for its video release it is now "Pi'ata: Survival Island" (although I still say "The Killer Pi'ata" would be even better). I am sure that most people who force themselves to sit through this film do so for the same reason I did: Nicholas Brandon played Xander on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" for seven years. I am also sure that Brandon's fans will have the same response, namely to wonder why the actor cannot get a break even when he is not playing the luckless Xander.