Treasure Island (1999 independent film)

The New York Times critic Stephen Holden cited the film as one of the most original features at the 1999 New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival,^[6] describing it as a "stylish black and white film" that turns "into an eerie ghost story exploring oppressive racial and sexual stereotypes in wartime America with deadpan humor".^[6][7]

In 2000, Holden wrote a longer review in which he wrote Treasure Island is an "increasingly chaotic comic riff on The Man Who Never Was, Ewen Montagu's account (made into a 1956 film starring Clifton Webb) of a scheme concocted by British intelligence to mislead Germany about the invasion of Sicily."^[8] He concluded, "For all the ideas it tosses around -- and many of them are useful and painful correctives to our rose-colored fantasies [of WWII] -- Treasure Island is too crude a movie to muster much rhetorical clout. But in deconstructing a myth, it does find one ingenious parallel: its man who never was a paradigm becomes a paradigm for an era that never was. Or at least it wasn't the way we would like to remember it."^[8]

In The A.V. Club, Scott Tobias wrote Treasure Island is "a truly audacious American independent with the courage to follow its doggedly idiosyncratic convictions. Made without so much as a nod to commercial considerations, it stood out among the dramatic-competition entries at Sundance in 1999, when it won a Special Jury Prize alongside such Indiewood fare as Happy, Texas and Guinevere. But, tempting as it is to praise Treasure Island simply for being different, King's experimental pastiche of '40s technique and late-'90s transgression never quite comes together, falling victim to its own willful obscurity.^[9]

Treasure Island won a Special Jury Prize for Distinctive Vision in Filmmaking at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival.^[10][11]

At the 1999 Independent Spirit Awards, it was nominated for the first John Cassavetes Award, under the name Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature (Under $500,000).^[12]

• Original theatrical trailer
• Treasure Island at IMDb
• Treasure Island at Rotten Tomatoes