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Dark Island

aka Infected

(2010/Canada)

‘‘If you’re receiving this message, Test Forty Eight did not go as planned’’

Insidious biological government experimentation is taking place on a remote island and all indigenous species are dead. Only a small unit of scientific researchers remains at the testing ground, but when all contact with them is lost another team of specialists is sent in to investigate. What they discover cannot be allowed to leave the island with them !.

Multi corporation Altracorp are developing a safe energy program with radical results via secret testing, outside of the USA governing practices, and well outside of ethical constraints. Development of a biological weapon, intended to aid mankind against the threat of global terrorism, in order to act as a deterrent against war. Just how far do you go though in order to create something so all powerful in order to stop something just as all consuming and devastating as that which it is intended to counteract !?.

 

Dr. Sophie Miller, a highly regarded toxicologist, joins an Altracorp reconnaissance and rescue team, suitably kitted up and destined for the secluded island. Their mission to determine what has happened to the original scientific team and to re-establish contact with Altracorp to relay back information as to the test results carried out.

The team is made up of three guys and two women, and immediately upon arrival at the beach of the island it is very clear that all is not well !. There is not a sound of any wildlife at all, and at the tree line of the dense tropical jungle is littered with dead birds. The flightless and lifeless organisms are saturated with a bizarre black treacle like substance, oozing from their carcasses.

The plot is standard fare but the Action is maintained throughout proceedings, and there are a few nice moments to keep an audience embroiled in this low budget horror. Fans of top TV show Lost will draw semblance from the foreboding presence of the evil entity that terrorises the human survivors. An all enveloping mass of black cloud like being possesses, eviscerates and re-manifests itself in order to take control of any living host. This tremendous force is a destructive living entity born out of human experimentation and in its unfettered form is free to do what it wants to !.

 

The team must gather important test data and formulate a counter agent against this malevolent entity in order to harness its force. A makeshift repellent gas gun keeps the aggressive formation at bay but does little against its intuitive ability to manipulate what is around it. There is an Evil Dead (1981) segment where the jungle tree vines attack the retreating Altracorp people, along with several splurges of blood letting to add to proceedings.

It’s up to the doctor to attain a direct sample of the black gloop living organism from a possessed living host in order to reverse engineer the substance and develop an antidote

With an evacuation swat team preparing to storm the island and retrieve whatever they can before destructively pulling the plug on the project time is running out for the few surviving. In the heart of the jungle at the main testing site a battle for supremacy plays out as an Altracorp insider strives to take control of the entity, whilst his rational counterpart fights to directly feed the antitoxin into the heart of the island to bring an end to the abomination.

There’s plenty of edge of the seat Action at closure and still enough time to deliver a reveal to turn events, leaving things up in the air with a suitably sinister twist.


Movie Rating: 6/10

Review Paul Cooke / Source Region 1 NTSC DVD

Dark Island (2010)

Director Sam Gorski & Niko Pueringer
With Jai Koutrae, Zero Kazama, Mary Christina Brown,
Rob O’Brien, Eric Raymond Lim & Rodney Wiseman