When I first saw the trailer for “Fantasy Island,” as I sat in an AMC with my best friend, I remember turning to her and saying, “That looks really cool! We should go see it!”

I had heard a bit about the old Fantasy Island TV show, so I was interested to see how the movie compared.

I’m not one who is super big on thriller movies, but since it’s a new year I really wanted to open myself up to new things.

I thought this movie would be a great starting point, and my expectations were high after seeing the film was from the producers of “Get Out” and “Halloween,” both of which have very high ratings on Rotten Tomatoes.

However, despite an intriguing trailer, this movie left me dissatisfied.

The writing is subpar, there is a large lack of originality, as well as what seems to be an overall lack of effort—especially when it comes to the end of the film.

The general premise of this movie is that five people win a contest to go to this beautiful and exciting island and play out any fantasy they wish. The only catch is, every fantasy must come to a “natural conclusion.” As the story progresses, each fantasy begins to turn into a nightmare for every guest.

Because there are five guests and four fantasies (two of the guests are step brothers who share a fantasy to essentially have the frat party of their dreams), there’s a lot of jumping around between characters.

This made for, in my opinion, poorly-developed characters and a difficult time to truly get emotionally invested in any of the stories.

When one sees a relatively big name like Lucy Hale in a film, expectations immediately rise. However, I feel like even the biggest and most famous actors could not have saved the terrible writing of this movie.

It felt as though writers each wrote their own scripts and then decided to mash them all together and call it a movie.

There seems to be too much happening on this little island, which makes for a somewhat hard to follow story.

On top of the train wreck of bad writing, there is very little originality in this film, which again feels like it’s just a mash of different overdone tropes and scenarios.

The first scene shows Sloane (Portia Doubleday) getting kidnapped in signature horror movie drag-away fashion.

From that moment on I was a little worried about the remainder of the film.

Further, this movie is heavily based on the “bullied girl takes revenge” trope, which is truly an exhausted trope at this point.

I feel like I had heard every single conversation between Melanie (Lucy Hale) and Sloane in a different movie or TV show before. It made for a boring film, to say the least.

Finally, perhaps the worst part of the movie was the ending.

The writers spent so much time trying to build up for an exciting and suspenseful ending that there was no time left in the movie to execute it. Instead, they opted for a weak and lazy plot twist which wrapped up the movie in what felt like five minutes.

While there were some good moments in the film and a bit of humor to lighten the mood, I still would not recommend seeing this movie.

There is nothing special or original about it.

It truly feels like this movie was just thrown together and put out there for the world to consume without any regard for excitement, originality or good writing.

There are hundreds of movies I would want to watch before settling on this one again.