Panic at Rock Island (2011)

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2022) Here’s a paradox for you, film fans: There are some stories so generic they can be shot almost anywhere in the world. If it’s shot in your backyard, you may love it to pieces for no other reason than it shows your reality to the outside world. But if it’s shot elsewhere, it may be likable just for showing you someone else’s reality. Of course, all of this breaks down if the result isn’t all that interesting no matter where it takes place. This roundabout way of talking about Panic at Rock Island is a way of dealing with how, despite taking place in picturesque, likable Sydney (Australia), the film itself feels like an utterly generic and disposable take on an Ebola outbreak horror film. Some of this is clearly explainable by it being a made-for-TV movie for the unimaginative Syfy channel. But even that’s not quite an excuse for the dull, dull, dull way director Tony Tilse handles this outbreak-at-an-island-music-festival horror film: everything is dark, blurry and choppy on a visual level, and equally muddy at the plot level. Characters make dumb decisions, and by the end of the film we’re asked to believe in western governments having fun creating terrible diseases for nebulous purposes. (You’d hope that Covid would drive a nail through those dumb ideas, but if nothing else, the pandemic has proven that there’s no idea stupid enough that some people won’t believe it.)  In any case—the film itself is dull, the Sydney setting is badly utilized and ye, I’ll admit that the same film set in Ottawa would have me giddily lapping it up with far fewer objections.