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Treasure Island

2000, Movie, NR, 83 mins

Treasure Island: Review

TREASURE ISLAND
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Graphic sex and nudity notwithstanding, director Scott King has forged an uncannily accurate simulation of a 1940s B-movie; it even opens with its own pitch-perfect fake newsreel snippet setting up the feature to come. It's 1942, and on San Francisco's Treasure Island, which the U.S. Navy has been using as a center for encryption and decoding, officers Frank (Lance Baker) and Sam (Nick Offerman) are handed a dead body and an unusual assignment. Naval intelligence plans to dump the body, loaded with fake intelligence, where the Japanese are sure to find it; Frank and Sam must create a convincing false identity for the corpse. As they begin forging personal documents, elements of their own sexuality begin seeping into the corpse's profile. Frank doesn't believe in sex before marriage, but has two wives and a girlfriend on the side. Sam and his wife, Penny (Daisy Hall), cruise bars picking up strange men for threesomes, an arrangement that seems to excite Sam more than his wife. As the dead man's identity begins to crystallize, odd things start happening: The word "queer" keeps popping up, and the corpse assumes its own life and begins interfering in those of its creators. Loosely based on a real-life case of espionage that also inspired the 1956 British film THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS, this enigmatic thriller recalls the heyday of the New Queer Cinema, when films like SWOON and POISON used old movies to hold the new wine of queer theory. It's not always clear exactly what King's getting at; he not only takes on sexual politics, but also racism and America's treatment of its own history. But while getting the look just right (King shot the entire film himself with a 1932 Mitchell camera for that vintage feel) he's also re-created the mysterious essence of those old noir films that whispered unsettling, often incoherent things about the underside of the American psyche. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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