TANYA’S ISLAND is the kind of curiosity that we just don’t ever see anymore. That could be a good thing, because I’m sorry to say that TANYA’S ISLAND is not a good movie in just about any definition or interpretation of the word “good.” In some measurable ways, it’s absolutely not a good thing that we don’t get movies this freaky and fucked-up anymore. I’ll get to those ways in a minute.
Released on December 5th in 1980, TANYA’S ISLAND was made in Canada, mostly by Canadians, and filmed in Puerto Rico. It stars the late Vanity as Tanya. (Puerto Rico plays the Island.) The director, Alfred Sole, sadly died in February of this year. Originally from New Jersey, he started out directing parodies of horror films and well-known porn films (back when there were still well-known porn films), and likely remains most famous to our readers as the director of 1976’s ALICE, SWEET ALICE, before segueing into a career as a production designer in television on series like Veronica Mars, Castle, and the MacGyver reboot. None of that is going to prepare you too well for TANYA’S ISLAND, which is somewhere between an art film, a softcore porno, and a creature feature. It’s lost in limbo somewhere between them, that is. I truly don’t want to speak ill of Alfred Sole and his movie, but I think it’s fair to call TANYA’S ISLAND “a weird mess.“ That doesn’t mean it’s without any value at all.
Speaking strictly as a male human being of heterosexual inclinations, and I am so truly sorry but that’s just how I arrived here, TANYA’S ISLAND is pure in its presentation of Vanity, who was always my personal favorite Prince protégée, with sincerest respect to Appolonia (the most underrated, even with her star turn in PURPLE RAIN) and to Carmen Electra (probably the most hilarious one, if you’ve ever seen the dance-off episode of Baywatch). Vanity had true star power, and not only because of her unbelievable appearance. Sit for a Vanity marathon of BERRY GORDY’S THE LAST DRAGON, NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE, 52 PICK-UP, and ACTION JACKSON and tell me I’m loony. That right there is a movie star who needed more movies to star in. That said, TANYA’S ISLAND was made before all those others. Vanity wasn’t even Vanity then. The credits here list her as “D.D. Winters” (the same billing she took in 1980’s TERROR TRAIN, released a few months before TANYA’S ISLAND). This movie is a curious case of getting to see a star-before-they-became-a-star who never rightly got to become a star. This movie is a curious case, but there was a time when maybe it wasn’t that curious.
Our modern movie monoculture is so damn different from what was going on in 1980. I was a bowl-cut-rocking baby then, so I was not able to appreciate what we had, but I do know what we have now: Massive-budgeted multiplex monopolizers burning through often-flimsy IP, along with dogged theatrical stalwarts like prestige pictures (can’t have stuff to talk about on social media without ‘em!) and never-say-die genres like horror and action. Yet somehow, no softcore art films featuring actors in gorilla suits! Can you imagine going to a theater to see a movie where a young woman with a shitty boyfriend dreams about living on a tropical island and ends up living on that tropical island, without much of an explainer to how she got there or concession to any kind of reality? (I could have stopped at ‘Can you imagine going to a theater to see a movie” but that’s another article, not this one.) And once she gets to the island, she falls in love with… a gorilla monster who Tanya names “Blue?” That’s right, TANYA’S ISLAND is absolutely a movie about a love triangle between Vanity, some randomly bearded white guy, and a dude in a gorilla suit. Not a moment in the thing is played for comedy. It’s more of a sex-type situation, to be honest. King Kong couldn’t ultimately follow through on his love for Ann Darrow, practically speaking, but Blue gets it done, man.
I first saw TANYA’S ISLAND about ten years ago, and I kind of hated it. Believe me, if anyone is built to appreciate a film where Vanity finds romance with a gorilla, I was made to love her. But I reacted badly to it. It feels (I assume inadvertently) ignorant, maybe ill-considered at best. TANYA’S ISLAND takes the racial subtext of KING KONG and accidentally makes it ubertext. Devil’s advocate, maybe it complicates such critiques by recasting the Fay Wray figure in the form of the mixed Vanity (Jewish and African-American), but ultimately this film isn’t sophisticated enough to navigate the cultural discomforts raised by a story about a white guy (“Lobo,” his name is!) getting violently jealous over his girlfriend finding a brand-new lover who is an extreme “other.” In America, invoking that kind of thematic implication should probably be approached with more responsibility than this slight and airy and insanely doofy movie is able to shoulder. Some movies feel like miscalculations. This one feels wrong. To me, anyway. Your mileage, as always, etc. If there’s something deeper here, maybe I missed it.
Looping back around to the positive, one area where even misbegotten movies like TANYA’S ISLAND provide undeniable value is as a training ground for some exceptionally talented people. Cinematographer Mark Irwin shot most of David Cronenberg’s 1980s movies (and 2005’s THE RINGER, which I worked on!), and okay, so by 1980 he had already made two films with Cronenberg, one of them THE BROOD!, so this wasn’t exactly his big break, but hey, at least Mark Irwin got to go to Puerto Rico! And the gorilla suit was made by wizards: Rick Baker and his then-apprentice Rob Bottin. I said: Rick Baker and Rob Bottin. There were also contributions from effects legend Steve Johnson (GHOSTBUSTERS, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, SPIDER-MAN 2, BLADE 2, etc., etc., etc., although I am having a hard time researching what exactly he did on this film.) And Don McLeod, the guy in the “Blue” suit with the enviable job of doing all his scenes with Vanity, later went on to play the werewolf Quist in Joe Dante’s THE HOWLING.
All of which makes TANYA’S ISLAND a pretty damn notable asterisk. And it gives you Vanity, before she was “Vanity,” before she was gone too young, looking for all the world like a movie star. It’s surely a mixed blessing of a movie, but maybe it ain’t either a curse.
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Tags: Alfred Sole, Canada, D. D. Winters, Denise Matthews, Don McLeod, Donny Burns, Gorillas, Mariette Lévesque, Mark Irwin, Mick Garris, Movies Of The Damned, Pierre Brousseau, Playboy, Puerto Rico, Richard Sargent, Rick Baker, Rob Bottin, Steve Johnson, The 1980s, Toronto, vanity
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