Miss Castaway and the Island Girls

I admittedly did no research ahead of watching “Miss Castaway and the Island Girls” for the first time, so I wasn’t quite sure of what to expect going in. I can say that the last thing that I anticipated was a low-budget “Movie Movie” with a plot involving Noah’s Ark, Michael Jackson, the Tim Burton “Planet of the Apes”, and a giant prehistoric bipedal pig.
I have talked and written at length before about the weaknesses of the “Movie Movie” genre in my reviews of “Epic Movie” and “Disaster Movie”, both also on the IMDb Bottom 100. I won’t retread that ground, other than to point out that this style of movie has no longevity for future audiences due to their reliance on references and current pop cultural references. “Miss Castaway” definitely suffers from this in a huge way, given most of the ‘humor’ is derived from lampooning movies like “Castaway” and “Miss Congeniality”, which are barely on the cultural radar nowadays. However, that is a weakness of all of these movies, and there are plenty of issues unique to “Miss Castaway” that the big budget sister films like “Epic Movie” and “Disaster Movie” were able to evade.

First off, “Miss Castaway” is a cheap movie, and that is a fact that shows itself at every turn. Any time CGI is used (which is far too often), it looks like it was scraped out of the bottom of a barrel. Check out this clip featuring “Jurassic Pork”, one of the handful of CGI creatures in the movie.

Also, check out this dodo bird / alien thing. Doesn’t it look fantastic?
As you would expect, all of the acting and writing is abysmal. The acting is about what you should expect from any spoof movie, but the line deliveries are particularly stilted and wooden. Then again, there is no way to seriously deliver half of the lines in this script. For most of the movie, I was wondering if the writers had ever heard a human being talk before. In some ways, “Miss Castaway” dialogue feels like an alien race is trying to communicate with the audience, but their only knowledge of our planet, culture, and language is through movies circa 2004.

The plot feels like a clumsy patchwork to drive the characters from one reference to the next. It progressively devolves into incoherence, and it doesn’t make much sense to start with. I believe there are secret agents from the Vatican on board the crashed airplane who were hunting for Noah’s Ark, and were charged with saving it from humanoid Ape creatures who want to destroy humanity? There are also aliens involved at some point? It lost me about halfway through. I think Michael Jackson was in league with the Pope though.

Honestly, there isn’t much else to say about “Miss Castaway”. It is a cheap spoof movie that fails to be funny on paper, and is executed incredibly poorly. It is hard to compare Movie Movies to other kinds of movies, as they are kind of unique beasts. In comparison to the other Movie Movies on the IMDb Bottom 100, I can at least say that “Miss Castaway” is less low-brow that “Epic Movie” and “Disaster Movie”. It is far from high-brow, but I don’t recall much. if any, poop or bodily fluid humor, which puts it a notch above “Epic” and “Disaster” at least. However, the incredibly poor effects work probably puts “Castaway” right back down on their level. So, I guess it is pretty close to a draw? That is actually saying something for a movie with a fraction of their budgets, though.

In general, I don’t see any reason to recommend this movie. The plot is bafflingly stupid, the acting and writing are bad, and the effects are horrendous. If there were any actual humor to be had in the writing, the effects, acting, and plot might have been overcome. However, that was not the case. I advise avoiding this one, unless you have a burning need to see miserable CGI.