Tanya's Island (1980) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) |
Tanya's Island can best be described as the Canadian film in which Vanity gets naked constantly, starting in the opening credits, and eventually gets sodomized by a guy in a gorilla suit. Now THAT'S entertainment. Vanity plays an aspiring actress who seems to be involved in an unfulfilling relationship with a sensitive artist. One night she hears some heavy breathing upstairs in their apartment. There is a glowing light behind the bathroom door, and when she opens the door she is transported to a tropical island where she and her artist are running around in flimsy clothing or no clothing at all. They seem to be getting along better on the island than they were back in Canada, except that she is in the process of forming a relationship with a guy in a cheesy 1930s-style gorilla suit. Given the pretentious, yet incompetent nature of this film, and the fact that the entire island adventure is obviously a fantasy sequence or dream, this could mean one of three things:
They are the only three living beings on the island. The artist is jealous of Vanity's relationship with the gorilla, so he traps the gorilla and cages him. Vanity is outraged by this, so she frees the creature, whereupon the gorilla traps Vanity and cages her. Vanity tries to escape, whereupon the gorilla catches her, mounts her from behind, and .... She wakes up, and it was all a dream. I didn't make that up. In fact I didn't make up any of the above. That's really what the film is about. I reckon that 1980 was an especially poor year for Canadian films, because this ridiculous no-budget leftover from the 1970s zeitgeist was actually nominated for a Genie, the Hoser Oscar. To place it all in context, Meatballs was nominated for many, many Genies that year, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and FOUR (that's not a misprint) acting awards. Meatballs actually won the Genie for Best Original Screenplay and its female star, Kate Lynch, was honored as the Best Actress. Tanya's Island received a Genie nomination for the best costume design. Tanya's Island seems to think it has something to say about the psychology of love or dreams or something, but I'm not really sure what that might be. I know it's a very difficult film to watch. It has almost no dialogue, the presentation is smugly arty, the acting is sub-par, and the director is far too impressed with his own symbolic cinematography. At one point I was exhausted and hoping the film was near the end when I checked my DVD player and was disheartened to discover it had only been on for 28 minutes. To make matters worse, the DVD seems to have been created by simply converting a VHS tape. Oh, well, Vanity is naked a lot ... |
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