As we move closer and closer towards Halloween and the spooky season festivities kick off in earnest, it’s a foregone conclusion that a deluge of scary titles will find themselves dominating the Netflix most-watched list.
While there’s no reason why you can’t indulge your affinity for the horror genre all year round, there’s something about the buildup to Halloween that just gets people excited. That being said, just because a movie is proving popular on streaming doesn’t mean it’s any good, with Fantasy Island a case in point.
A prequel to the classic TV show that ran between 1977 and 1984, Sony and Blumhouse decided that the mysterious drama should be reinvented as a straightforward exercise in inducing terror, handing Kick-Ass 2 director Jeff Wadlow the reins to reinvent the property.
As is the case with most Blumhouse efforts, Fantasy Island was a decent-sized hit at the box office after raking in $48 million on a $7 million budget, but critics weren’t too kind. The film holds a dismal Rotten Tomatoes score of just 8%, although much more forgiving audiences deemed it worthy of a 48% rating.
Fantasy Island may have already returned to our screens thanks to Fox’s reboot that premiered last month, but the feature film version is also experiencing a resurgence on Netflix having spent the week climbing up the viewership charts, as per FlixPatrol.