MONSTER ISLAND - Mark Reviews Movies

Monster Island, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 24, 2025

Certain movies call for—nay, demand—an actor in a rubber suit over some computer-generated creature. Monster Island is exactly that sort of movie, and indeed, the monster here is portrayed in exactly the right way.

It is an actor, namely Alan Maxson, in a green, form-fitting costume that looks like a reptilian humanoid. Some may see it as silly, and those people are correct.

Among them will also be those who dismiss the monster because the idea of an actor in a costume is simply too ridiculous to them. To put it bluntly, that second group is wrong. Beyond the fact that the monster here—with the caveat that it is obviously an actor in a rubber suit—looks pretty convincing, writer/director Mike Wiluan is harkening back to a very specific kind of movie with this one. Any kind of modern technology being used to create this beast would go against the spirit of those intentions.

The monster is called Orang Ikan, and its most obvious on-screen counterpart is that Creature from the Black Lagoon. It possesses the same scaly skin, a similar collection of fins, and almost exactly the clawed hands of its inspiration. The main difference, perhaps, is this creature's mouth, with jaws that jut out from its face to highlight the beast's pointed teeth. It's too bad the Orang Ikan doesn't bite, rip, and tear its victims with those chompers, but to be fair to the monster, its claws do more than enough damage.

The Orang Ikan, obviously, lives on a remote, undiscovered island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The setup to get some inevitable victims and opponents of the monster involves a Japanese ship during World War II, currently transporting American POWs to the mainland. Wiluan offers a brief history lesson of these "Hell Ships," where conditions were terrible for prisoners, which would be sending soldiers to a likely worse situation back in Japan, and which were often mistaken as vessels of war by Allied forces. Only the last part really matters for the plot.

It sees one such ship sunk by American fighter planes and a submarine. Most of the crew and prisoners onboard are killed in the attack, but two of the survivors are a Japanese soldier named Saito (Dean Fujioka) and an American one named Bronson (Callum Woodhouse). Saito, who's to be executed back in Japan, is a prisoner just like his American counterpart, and shortly before the attack, the ship's captain shackles the two men together at the ankles.

Upon awakening on the seemingly deserted island, the two soldiers try to kill each other, until something in the water tries to kill Bronson. Realizing they have a mutual threat and have a better chance of surviving together, Saito and Bronson decide to team up to find food and water, evade some other Japanese survivors, and, obviously, try not to be brutally killed by the Oran Ikan.

It is a ferocious beast, to be sure. Those Japanese sailors provide the first examples of what the monster can do with its claws and its unnatural strength, showing off two different methods of decapitating a man and also ripping out one sailor's still-beating heart directly from his chest. The blood and gore, like the monster, are the results of practical effects.

Wiluan is clever in the way he presents his main monster, initially giving only glimpses of its full form and focusing on close-ups of its hands or jaws. So many movies in recent decades have relied on computer effects to create monsters that the exclusive use of a costume and practical effects to portray this one and its actions could have been a distraction. At first, the filmmaker teases the beast, instead, in order to make us used to the idea everything about the monster will be done for real. By the time the movie gives us longer shots of the Oran Ikan's entire frame, we accept the beast and its appearance as a legitimate threat and, when it might look a little cheap, as an intentional homage to an old-fashioned form of creature feature.

So much thought, craft, and effort have been put into the monster, though, that the rest of the movie can't live up to it. The gimmick of Saito and Bronson being chained together, for example, is solved pretty quickly, and the characters become more about representing growing trust and respect for each other than actual, well, characters. Decades of monster movies, obviously, have taught us not to expect too much from the humans in them. Regardless, it's still disappointing whenever a movie like this doesn't seem to know what to do with its characters, apart from having them make poor decisions that put them in repeated peril.

Relatively long stretches of this short movie (about 80 minutes without credits) are dedicated to Saito and Bronson, as they learn to trust each other—only for them to be separated for the second act, to come up with a terrible plan to stop the monster and have the whole thing resolve with an anticlimax, and to be the focus of an extended epilogue that plays as a highlight reel of the movie we just watched. The plot and characters of Monster Island are nothing more than excuses for the monster to do its thing. We know that, but the movie doesn't need to be so transparent about it.

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