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Fresh and Exciting

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Okay fine to be honest it is TERRIBLE. Cheap story that you would expect a grade 4 to write better. basically what happens is: 2 Women (Lesbians) go to a island to have a little vacation. they 1 night find a man knocking at the door and he falls in. They keep him for around 2 days, 1 of the women find him to be unsafe. but shes actually the one who works with him. She hired him to kill the other woman to take her money. But he didn't manage she came back to the house to try and rescue the other woman (the evil) because she thought she was being attacked. She beats him up. Then the bad woman kills the one that was supposed to die. Okay that's basically what happened. DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY OR TIME ON THIS.. NOT WORTH IT.

Is there a movie category lower than Straight-to-video? If so, perhaps it's Straight-to-Showtime-at-3 a.m., which is where I caught this little oddity. I won't waste any time on how idiotic the picture is since others have already explained it well--but I did want to comment on a "technique" so badly executed that I had to pinch myself to confirm what I was seeing and hearing. Midway though the film, for what seems like 20-30 minutes, there are passages of dialogue and voice-over narration that are accompanied by the actors talking, or mouthing words since you can't actually hear them--you can only hear the voiceovers. It seems like you've stumbled onto the worst dubbing job of all time. The actors appear to converse, and separate dialogue is heard on the soundtrack. I think the director was trying for artiness, a way of conveying events in a way parallel to the action on screen. Or something. We'd have to dig out THE CREEPING TERROR to find another botch job of this calibre.

**SPOILERS** Jogging through the streets of NYC well-known motivational speaker and former womens PGA golf champion Louise "Lou" Dalamere,Ally Sheedy, gets attacked by this masked weirdo with a stick-ball bat who almost kills her. After recovering from her injuries Lou and her live-in girlfriend Alex, Patsy Kensit, take a ride out to her country house in far out Shealter Island. It just happens to be that at the time that Lou & Alex got to the house a major storm hit the island and knocked out all the electricity and telephone lines leaving the two women alone and cut off from the outside world. Just then Lenny, Stephen Baldwin, the local clam digger gets swept up out of the ocean and dropped right into Lou's home. Agreeing to let Lenny stay over until the storm blows over Lou & Alex soon realize that he's anything but grateful to them for practically saving his life. Lenny imposes himself on the two women with his off-color remarks about their lesbian relationship and makes a total jerk of himself by also trying to hit on to Alex right in front of her startled lover Lou! Thus doing his best to out stay his very brief and unwanted welcome at the Dalamere house. It's obvious from the start that Lenny was anything but a stranded clam digger or even an Shealter Island resident but was part of some off-the-wall scheme to do in Lou and take off with her money making it look like her death was a drowning accident. It's also obvious that Lenny was the guy who attacked Lou earlier in the film in New York City that left her almost dead and that this time, in secluded Shealter Island, he was going to finish the job that he started back there. What we don't know about Lenny is that he's anything but alone in his attempt to murder Lou and has a lot more help in doing it then we, the audience, and Lou may think. Stephen Baldwin together with Ally Sheedy and Patsy Kensit are about as odd a trio as you would ever see in a motion picture. In most of their scenes together they came across so absurd that you at first thought that the scenes were badly done out-takes that for some reason or mistake, or maybe even practical joke, ended up getting edited back back into the movie. There was also the local Shealter Island Sheriff Deluca, Chris Penn, who also got into the act later in the movie that's after you forgot all about him and thought that his brainless actions earlier were just comic relief. Sheriff Deluca is also one of the major players in the plot to do in poor Lou.The ending of the movie was about as anti-climatic as you could make it with the only major actor in the film who, up to then, had nothing to do with the plot to murder and legally steal Lou's money ending up being the "mastermind" of this whole crazy and unbelievable scenario.

Other reviews on IMDb give an accurate enough summary of the plot. But they seem to have been expecting something like The Usual Suspects. Direct-to-video movies are usually inferior, with respect to production values and acting, than theatrical releases (poor as the latter generally are). So we shift into different critical gear when we watch a non-theatrical release. And by these standards, Shelter Island is not bad at all.The movie is by no means a "lesbian skin flick," and the scenes of (partial) nudity are few and brief in duration. The story line is entirely coherent, and the twists -some maybe predictable, some not- are quite entertaining. The acting is far above average for the kind of film we are talking about. Ally Sheedy puts more into her character than the writing would suggest, and in fact all the actors acquit themselves more than competently.Shelter Island moves along at a brisk pace, is snappily photographed and offers a few fun twists. This is what you'd call "a good popcorn movie." The movie gets 8 out of 10.