FEAR ISLAND is yet another dull slasher movie about a group of friends assembling on a remote spot and being bumped off one by one by a mysterious killer. Who's the one responsible? Does anybody actually care?

The answer is a resounding no. FEAR ISLAND is content to plod along without trying very hard to deliver thrills that are either genuinely exciting or indeed original. This Canadian TV movie was obviously made on a low budget; it has some violence, but otherwise the entire execution seems tame and subdued.

The poor quality of the cast doesn't help, with lots of screaming and overacting from the majority of the cast members. Not until I checked the film on the IMDb did I realise that Shawn Ashmore wasn't in this, but instead his twin brother, who isn't as charismatic an actor. Yeah, that's about as interesting as it gets.

Jenna (Haylie Duff) is found alive and with amnesia. Detective Armory (Martin Cummins) and Dr. Chalice (Anne Marie DeLuise) investigate the six dead and Jenna slowly recalls the events. Jenna and four friends (Aaron Ashmore, Kyle Schmid, Jessica Harmon, Jacob Blair) sail to an isolated island house. The island caretaker Keith finds 15 year old Megan (Lucy Hale) stowaway on their boat.

This is not scary, and that's the first thing I look for in a horror. The basic story of young hot people in an isolated location is nothing special. It could be a reasonable TV B-movie, but the no thrills kills won't get many horror fans excited. The problem is the wrapped-in-a-flashback-retelling construction. It takes away all the tension. And whether she's telling the truth or not, Haylie Duff just takes away all the excitement. I didn't care about Jenna or her story.

The other Duff sister gets her own slasher vehicle, a real dud with a twist you can see coming a mile away. A group of hot-looking college kids decide to yacht to a nice island retreat for some partying which turns sour really quickly when a killer, with a reason for his/her vengeance, ruins the festivities, murdering them one by one, leaving "clues" as to why each member is a victim, words in white paint, like INNOCENT and GUILTY. It all could be the result of a cruel sex prank played on an attractive but unpopular nobody in their school who went missing shortly afterward. The movie goes back and forth between a detective and psychologist questioning amnesia-stricken Hayley Duff and her reports (as they return to her supposedly in fragments told in jarring flashbacks) and the events that supposedly transpired during the death weekend on Fear Island. The movie pretty much casts doubt on Duff immediately because Haley isn't much of an actress who can play a tragic victim that convincingly or maybe it was the poor direction which never allows us to believe she is telling us the whole truth. I rarely believed much of anything the flashbacks were telling me and the psychologist, who seems to be on her side at first, while the detective is hard-nose-to-the-grindstone with her at the onset soon thinks she might be a victim instead of killer (which tells you how stupid his character is as I'm no detective and Duff practically has guilty stamped on her forehead due to her fishy, suspicious performance),denounces large pieces of her fractured testimony as not wholly matching the evidence recovered at the crime scene. Yet, this slasher film expects us to swallow the conclusion where the psychologist, who has reservations about Duff's innocence, actually accepts a drink from her before the parents are about to arrive, just proving that someone who is skilled at reading behavior doesn't seem so smart when it matters most. The scenes on the island are of the tiresome PG-13 variety, with characters right out of a I Know What You Did Last Summer sequel. None of the kill-scenes will leave you very overwhelmed..a rattlesnake bite to the chest is really as gory as it gets as most of the deaths are of the off-screen variety. Boring, with zero thrills, "Fear Island" will induce heavy snoring.