Carmen Elektra and Stop Action Monsters in MTV's MONSTER ISLAND DVD

MTV has turned out a low-budget saluite to stop motion animation with Monster Island with a lame story of teens partying on an island in the Bermuda Triangle that they won from MTV, interrupted by an attack by an ant queen which flies in and grabs up Carmen Elektra during her equally lame stage show. Adam West appears briefly as a mad scientist type named Harryhausen (after stop action animation king Ray harryhausen) who explains how government experiments got the ants and selecte other critters to grow to gargantuan proportions. The island itself is volcanic and expected to blow momentarily, West says as the teens try to rescue Carmen from the deceptively extinct-seeming caldera.

The critters which include a worker ant, ant queen, barely-seen spider, and a cool pair of praying matises, show a little bit too much polish -- literally; they seem to reflect light making them stand out a little too much from the scene. Otherwise they are pretty good.

The featurettes include a detailed look at special effects which includes some other barely glimpsed but illuminating behind-the-scenes bits, as well as interviews with West, Elektra, and the male lead.

The trailer is also included with a garish headline style straight out of Them or Best from 20,000 Fathoms, to help convey the 1950's creature feature style.

It's amusing and as good a way to waste 90 minutes as any I've seen in awhile. God knows, I can think of a dozen movies that even I, with my abysmal viewing standards (I even like the original Attack of the Giant Leeches) find somewhat entertaining.

The monsters are shot a frame at a time as tabletop models in Lionel train settings that are matched up with selective shots taken on the full scale sets. The result is intended to produce an authentic feel that makes it seem that doomed teens are actually interacting with critters as large, powerful, and voracious as they are made to seem. Sometimes you switch in a shot of a super-size ant head, actually a full-size puppet mock-up and shoot from what would be its back as it lunges after human prey, other times you see a guy who is trying to dodge a giant pincher which is actually extended from a pole held by a crewman from just beyond the edge of the scene. It's all a style Ray Harryhausen exploited so grandly for such movies as Jason and the Argonauts, 20 Million Miles from Earth, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, and Clash of the Titans now remade with a CG Kraken instead of stop action. Harryhausen worked with table-top creatures moved one fram at a time, sometimes in concert as with his jaw-dropping skeleton fight with Jason in Jason and the Argonauts. Harryhausen retired after Clash of the Titans, about the time CG effects started catching on, although there are some moviemakers, like the one that made this, who like to dabble with stop action although CG has taken over.

It does help to know going in that the whole thing is a parody, which you won't catch on to right away unless you see the trailer first.