Neville's Island DVD

Neville's Island is an ITV TV film which plays like The Lord of the Flies meets Three Men in a Boat. Except here there are four men, who, when their boat sinks, find themselves stranded on a small island in the middle of the Lake District's Derwent Water with a sausage and an almost defunct mobile phone. Given that our heroes are middle-aged executives on a weekend training exercise, tempers and personalities soon fray. Starting Martin-Men Behaving Badly-Clunes this is essentially a comedy, though the funniest lines go to Timothy Spall as the mercilessly sarcastic... Gordon. Jeff Rawle is Neville, the capable team leader, David Bamber the organised Angus, while Clunes has the plum role as Roy, whose mental instability triggers the sometimes-surreal concluding sequences. In a scene paralleling Scream (1996) the rules of the stranded-on-an-island film genre are established, allowing writer Tim Firth to have fun twisting the clichés. He even feints that the film is about to turn into a slasher pic, or the UK's answer to Deliverance (1972). Neville's Island does get a little out of its depth when it ventures into metaphysical waters, but the performances are perfectly judged and the exceptionally sharp dialogue delivers sustained amusement and intermittent belly laughs. On the DVD: There is a basic stills gallery and a list of screen credits for each of the four stars which is misleadingly labelled "biography". Otherwise there are no special features. The sound is effective three channel Dolby Pro logic with the dialogue well presented and Barrington Pheloung's inventive score highlighted. The anamorphically enhanced 1.77:1 ratio picture is occasionally grainy but the DVD clarity does succeed in making a TV film look like a real, albeit low-budget, feature film, with some beautiful daytime cinematography and some imaginative firework shots demonstrating strong contrast and luminosity.--Gary S Dalkin [show more]

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