In short: Piñata: Survival island (2002)

aka Demon Island

aka Survival Island

Two boatloads of frat people (our future heroes are played by Nicholas Brendon and Jaime Pressly, because that’s what can happen to your career, too, buddy) are dropped off on some godsforsaken island for a weekend tradition of drunken debauchery and some so-called “race” where handcuffed boy/girl pairs are running through the jungle collecting underwear that’s hanging in the trees and bushes, hitting piñatas full of little alcohol bottles to keep, ahem, hydrated. Clearly, these sad examples of humanity need killing badly, so it is a bit of a good turn of fortune for the audience that a legendary piñata containing the sins of a Mesoamerican village has found its way to the island too. A couple of smacks with a stone later, the thing’s running around murdering drunken idiots and idiotesses left and right, hooray.

Look, I know you can’t expect art, taste or style when you sit down to watch a movie about a murderous piñata, and if you go into a thing like this with anything but the lowest expectations, you’ll only suffer the more for it. However, there are crap movies at least being entertaining in their way, and then there’s David and Scott Hillenbrand’s Piñata: Survival Island, a thing made with such staggering incompetence, it hides its only selling point, a Chiodo brothers creature that looks as if they had put it together in a lunch break - or perhaps two - behind terrible CGI effects and a monster attack camera so jittery, one might suspect Tony Scott being involved in the production.

What else is there the film could have to offer? Thirty year olds playing college students? Jokes so terrible, they wouldn’t know funny if it eviscerated them with a machete? Characters that can’t die quickly enough? Monster vision sequences that consist of unparsable red? A lack of technical acumen so complete, you might sell it as a black hole?


It’s really, really bad, and not bad in the way that makes one think wistfully of aliens making movies, or people making movies who have only ever heard of the art but never seen a film, but the way that makes one think less of everyone involved in the stinker one has suffered through.