Phantasma-gore-ia Blog

This decidedly offbeat flick starts with a man taking his disjointed family to KFC, leaving them clues to a kind of treasure hunt of sorts left in ever-smaller bags like fast-food Chinese nesting boxes.  As they embark on his peculiar odyssey, they start to weld bonds that bridge the gaps they let grow in preceding years.  An unsual sort of family film, it's my idea of a cool way to spend an hour and a half.

Just that.  Like any Christie masterpiece, it's a total guessing game with a frustrating lack of answers for its hapless cast of characters.  Essentially, ten people find themselves on an island with a record that accuses them individually of varying crimes.  They get knocked off successively with an ending that, while not in keeping with Agatha's original story due to the dictation of the Hayes code, is still a "wow" moment.  It's similarities to Identity (2002) can't be ignored, but that doesn't mean by any respect that the latter isn't a great movie or even derivative, managing to devise new and smart connections between the characters as reasons for them all to be held down and picked off, one by one.

Not overly spectacular but not terrifically bad, this fare (ahem) was a good time at the movies, if you can get a hold of it.  Expect similarities to Turbulence and Turbulence 2: Fear of Flying, Die Hard III and, to a degree, Red-Eye.  ;)