"Danger Island" TV Series, 1992

[MerryPrankster]

When I was in elementary school, there was a TV movie starring Kathy Ireland entitled "Danger Island." It tells the tale of a group of people who flee a military coup in the Caribbean whose plane goes down.

Some of the people who survive the crash float in a life raft to a small island, where all sorts of weird stuff happens. It turns out the island is an abandoned biological-weapons testing facility. Two men are attacked by some sort of octopus-like creature and infected with a DNA-altering virus--one mutates into a man-fish-type creature, while the other undergoes more subtle changes. Both of them have flashbacks to the collapse of order on the island years ago.

It turns out that one of the survivors of the plane crash was actually there when it all went down.

The movie was released on DVD/video as "The Presence."

http://www.amazon.com/Presence-Tommy-Lee-Wallace/dp/B00008G8NA

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104049/

It was supposed to be a pilot for a TV series, but the series never got off the ground. What if it had? Could we have Lost, only 15 years earlier?

 

[Doctor What]

Hey--I actually remember this movie!

It was kind of a low budget version of Lost IIRC --and because it was a pilot of a series that never got off the ground, a lot of questions were left unanswered.

Not sure if they could have sustained it tho--like X-Files and all the other quasi occultish shows around, there's only so long you can keep the mysteries going before it a) annoys the audience that they're not getting any answers or b) when the answers DO come they get pissed off that it was so lame.

I think it would have more like a footnote in TV history rather than groundbreaking TV.

 

[MerryPrankster]

I'm glad someone besides me liked the movie.

Would Lost not exist in a TTL with a 1-2 season Danger Island series? If DI eventually got cancelled, it would be harder to do Lost since everyone would remember "that other weird island show" and not want to take a risk.

On the other hand, people would remember DI and want to do it better. The cancellation of Dark Angel hasn't prevented that new show Heroes from getting started, and the cancellation of Serenity didn't stop the new version of Battlestar Galactica.

 

[MerryPrankster]

I wonder how far they could spin out a series from the movie.

By the end of the movie, Frank (the guy who turned into the man-fish) is dead and Rick (the less-mutated fellow) is recovering, although he did apparently develop some kind of touch-based telepathy as a result (he knew that Ben was really the scientist Babcock from his dreams). Plus Ben is going to have some explaining to do once the others realize he was the one who caused the whole thing to collapse.

The plane crash survivors have given the antidotes for the bio-weapons to the island's Indian population which the scientists experimented on at one point, although I don't remember WHY (I don't remember mutant Indians).

There's still the octopus-like creature and the exploding rotten fruit to deal with, along with the plants whose secretions cause hallucinations (the Marine cuts himself on one and then imagines the Indian girl turning into a monster). And who knows what else is on the island?