Review: Panic at Rock Island (2011)

“Killer concert turns deadly.”

Director: Tony Tilse

Starring: Grant Bowler, Zoe Cramond and Eli Kent

Writer: Matt Ford

Made for television disaster movies can be some of the funniest movies around, especially if the budget isn’t big enough to cover the earth ending events. Now I’ve had my share of American disaster movies and thought it was time to venture to my home countries domain and check out this viral outbreak disaster film. I never thought it would turn out as bad it did.

So a rock concert is thrown on an island just off the harbour of Sydney, Australia. People are coming from all over Australia to join in the massive three day event, in fact some Kiwi’s have managed to sneak onto the island through a sewer access tunnel that connects to Sydney. On their way to the concert they happen to come across an infected military man in the sewers, and unfortunately become carriers of this deadly virus. Can Joe Quinn stop the infection from spreading to the mainland? Will everyone die at the concert? Can people be actually as stupid as this movie portrays them?

My biggest problem with this movie is that for the events to occur, everyone has to act like a complete and utter idiot. Corrupt government officials, parents, kids, concert organisers, military squads. The only character that has any intelligence is Joe Quinn (Grant Bowler) and everyone just disbelieves him. Even when he has enough concern to shut everything down, oh no can’t do that there’s money to be made. While this kind of blind ignorance is a staple of the disaster genre, it is at it’s apex with this movie.

With the plot being in a complete and utter shambles, and honestly me hoping most characters died a horrible death, I was really happy to find that some characters did indeed die horrible deaths. The virus makes its victims excrete every kind of body fluid under the sun and the movie isn’t shy in showing how disgusting it can get. So for those of you who like their viral disaster movies disgusting you might find something here.

No matter how good the virus effects may be, the story is a complete and waste of your time. When you make people do completely illogical things in order to progress the story then you know you’ve got problems. If you like watching bad movies then give this a watch, but really just skip it and do your self the favour.