‘Send Help’ hangover: how hard is it to find a really good island movie?

First Sam Raimi film to get an R rating in 25 years, Send Help was disappointing. (Not for Robby, who had zero expectations.) Personally, I was looking for more craziness, more gore, more suffering, and definitely less CGI slop. It also seemed to be a weak specimen of the “stranded on an island” genre, which is all about how much of our civilization still holds when we’re once again reduced to survival. Raimi had a great premise on his hands – out in the jungle, who will survive, you or your boss? – and didn’t take it far enough.

I love how this is Sam Raimi’s Ugly Betty

But first: what is an island movie? Finding water has to be a problem. We need tangled beards, dirt, lunacy and occasionally purulent infections. Shutter Island (2010, Martin Scorsese) is not an island movie, but The Island (1980, Michael Ritchie) is, with its glorious tribe of buccaneers. You need the shot of someone waking up with their face full of sand under the shining sun; you need a Cast Away (2000, Robert Zemeckis) vibe. Supernatural deviations are allowed, like in the series Lost, and occasionally the island movie doesn’t occur on an island, like in the series Yellowjackets.

A good island movie will expose the cracks of civilization, even leaving space for some social critique, unless you’re M. Night Shyamalan and decide to turn it into a geographical time machine for a reason I can’t explain (Old, 2021). In that sense, Ruben Östlund did what Sam Raimi couldn’t, especially not with the lazy writing by Mark Swift and Damian Shannon. The third part of Triangle of Sadness (2022) brings us the same inverted power relations caused by the better survival skills of those who are at the bottom of the social pyramid, but done better, with perversion and a real sense of humor. It follows the corruption of the powerful by their power, including isolating the group from a nearby source of rescue. If you see some similarities, notice that this isn’t the only movie that “inspired” Send Help; you can also find some traces of it in the excellent Misery (1990, Rob Reiner), like the dinner proposition, for example. Misery, though, is crazier, and for that, much better.

The dinner proposition scene, which was done better elsewhere

Waiting for a commented list of the craziest island movies we can think of (you can already access it on Letterboxd), I’m left here, somewhat frustrated, feeling silly for expecting something at least fun from the guy who brought us Evil Dead and Drag Me to Hell. Maybe he took a breath of the air of our times, I thought, and took work dynamics and gender inequality into consideration, but I realize that was just too optimistic. Unfortunately, Send Help is an assembly of badly executed clichés, including the monster as an “ugly” and lonely woman. Had it gone all the way — given me some rotting limbs, built an actual cruel corporate man for Bradley, or made me fear Linda as I feared Misery’s Annie — it would even have been forgivable.