Wonder how many of these monsters made it into the actual film?
Monster Island is a film made by The Asylum, as a Mockbuster of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) the aired on Syfy.
The story focuses on Billy Ford, a controversial venture capitalist billionaire and CEO of Benthic Prospecting, and his team working on a deep sea mining operation. Suddenly, their remote deep sea probe is destroyed. Assuming it was caused by an underwater volcano, Ford and his team, along with government overseer Cherise Ramon, take a manned submarine to investigate. Instead of a volcano they find a massive organism that threatens to destroy the world. Now it’s a race against time to find the only thing powerful enough to defeat this threat.
Not to be confused with the MTV movie of the same name.
Contains Examples Of…
- Alien Blood: The Tengu bleeds lava.
- The Brigadier: General Horne, not quite as reasonable as most examples however.
- Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Tengu launches countless eggs which hatch into creatures that are twice the size of a human, with translucent bat wings and mandibles that take up the entire head and look like a pair of horse skulls. Somehow this grows up to become a starfish the size of a small island.
- Covers Always Lie: For starters, none of them show the actual Tengu.
- The main poster (shown on IMDB and Wikipedia), shows a slightly different looking version of the Living Mountain surrounded by three other kaiju, one of the Children of Tengu, another looks like a cross between an alligator and an arthropod, and one that looks like like it is made of wood.
- The DVD cover (above) is similar showing all four of the aforementioned kaiju plus three others: a crocodile kaiju, a kaiju closely resembling Godzilla, and a kaiju that looks like a shaved werewolf.
- In addition both of the above posters show a wrecked train, that's never in the movie, and present the monsters as fighting in locations that never are never present in the movie either: the main poster has them in a jungle (Monster Island appears so be sand rocks) and the DVD cover shows them is a big city (while there is a sea side community close to where the Tengu threatens to make landfall, the kaiju never make it into the city).
- The Japanese poster, shows an organic kaiju shooting a beam of energy into the sky, unapologetically copying the poster for King Of The Monsters.
- The Cuckoolander Was Right: Everyone thought Rena Hangaroa was crazy for believing that the kaiju were real.
- Disk-One Final Boss: Subverted, at first it seems that Ford’s plan to kill the Tengu worked and now they have to deal with the Tengu's innumerable children, but during the climax it’s revealed that the Tengu is still alive.
- Expy:
- Billy Ford seems to be based on Tony Stark without the power armor.
- Though probably unintentional, the relationship between the Living Mountain and Tengu—one being an absolute force of destruction and the other being its countermeasure—is very similar to the Heisei versions of Gamera and Gyaos.
- Fictional Field of Science: Geo-Mythology, the corroboration of myths to explain natural disasters.
- Hive Mind: The Children of Tengu are indicated to have this, as General Horne noted if you attack one of them the rest will immediately swarm to its defense like killer bees.
- Ignored Expert: Rena Hangaroa.
- Prophecy Twist: "When the blood of the Kaiju enters the eye of the mountain it will be awakened". Initially interpreted to mean that lava flowing into a crater in one of the mountains on Monster Island would wake up the Living Mountain. It’s actually more literal, once a piece of lava enters the Living Mountain's eye it activates a power that triggers an explosion that kills both Kaiju.
- Sadly Mythtaken: The Tengu of Japanese Mythology are a race of Winged Humanoids with either bird faces or red skin and large noses with their name translating to heavenly dogs. In this movie the Tengu is a race of giant six rayed starfish like creatures with retractable wings, and their name roughly translates to "destroyer".
