Director/Screenplay – Stewart Raffill, Producers – James Brolin & Diane Kirman, Photography – Jon Darbonne, Music – John R. Graham, Special Effects Supervisor/Production Design – Jim Walsh. Production Company – Good Looking Ink.
Cast
Antonio Sabato Jr. (Michael Pace), Annalynne McCord (The Siren/Simone Delacroix/Morning), Jim [James] Brolin (Terry Bamba), Joanna Bacalso (Sherry Pace), Dalas L. Davis (Constable Crick), Avery Sommers (Charlotte), Stacey Anne Rose (Officer Smith), Mario Macaluso (Bert Pace), Marney McClellan (Stacey Pace), Simone Griffeth (Karen), Lou Gazzara (Seamus), Ashley Anderson (Britt), Emmanuel Delcour (Harry Sugar)
Plot
Screenwriter Michael Pace is in The Bahamas working on a script. While swimming in the sea, he comes across a woman unconscious in the water and rescues her. She proves to have no memory of who she is. She suggests he give her a name and he decides to call her Morning. She comes onto Michael and he readily forgets about his wife to sleep with her. The native maid Charlotte spurns Morning, saying that she is a witch. Michael then wakes up to find this was all a dream. Michael persuades big name scriptwriter Terry Bamba to write a script about the experience and agrees to fund it himself and allow Bamba to make his directorial debut. When it comes to casting the role of Morning, Michael finds the perfect actress in Simone Delacroix, who resembles the girl in his dream. However, Simone comes to wield an unusual and deadly spell over the production.
Stewart Raffill is a British-born director based in the US. Raffill has made a number of adventure films, including popular hits like The Adventures of the Wilderness Family (1975) and The Sea Gypsies (1978). Of interest to us, Raffill has made a number of genre films, reaching a peak with The Ice Pirates (1984) and The Philadelphia Experiment (1984) and then the notorious Mac and Me (1988). This was followed by assorted other dabblings including Mannequin on the Move (1991), Tammy and the T-Rex (1994) and Croc (2007).
Bad Girl Island feels like a turn for the tawdry for Stewart Raffill, although I suppose after you’ve made Tammy and the T-Rex wherein Paul Walker’s brain is transplanted into an animatronic dinosaur your career is not looking any great shakes. Indeed, Raffill has only made one other film subsequent to Bad Girl Island with the musical Standing Ovation (2010). Even from the title, Bad Girl Island feels as though it should be more of an Erotic Film made for the Playboy Channel or a release from Seduction Cinema. It isn’t and the oddity of watching it is when it comes what in any other film would be the steamy love scenes the camera coyly cuts away and shows nothing more than PG-13 rated bare backs and side boobs. The puzzle of Bad Girl Island is also what on Earth an award-winning actor like James Brolin, who plays the role of the film director, and also produces the film, is doing involved in such a throwaway effort.
Annalynne McCord as Morning, the mysterious femme fatale
The film also has a plot structure that is confusing. Antonio Sabato Jr. plays a screenwriter working at a villa in The Bahamas where he saves amnesiac mystery girl Annalynne McCord from the sea. They embark on a steamy relationship during which he seems to forget all about his wife Joanna Bacalso. He leaves Annalynne on a yacht with his friend Emmanuel Delcour, only for Delcour to then turn up mysteriously dead. Antonio then wakes up and this all proves to be a dream, although confusingly Emmanuel Delcour is still dead under mysterious circumstances. Antonio then sets out to make a film about what happened, hiring James Brolin to write a script, where the script Brolin comes up with coincidentally repeats the same dialogue that Sabato was uttering earlier. As producer, Sabato finds the perfect lead actress when a girl who is an identical ringer for Annalynne McCord’s mystery girl walks in, and casts her only for her to prove to be a femme fatale who begins to mysteriously kill people on set.
Annalynne McCord, an actress who never quite found the stature she easily could have, looks luscious and stunning as the Femme Fatale of the show. But the crucial problem you are stuck is the simply the question of “why do I care about a film about a guy trying to make a film about a sex fantasy?” – least of all one that seems fundamentally confused about its premise. The most bizarre part is the end where Raffill seems to want to turn Bad Girl Island into a big message work about the plight of refugees and how many of them are drowned at sea each year. What exactly this has to do with a man trying to make a film about a sexual fantasy dream he had and a femme fatale plot could be anybody’s guess.
