Dead Man's Island - a toupological analysis.

Dead Man's Island is a 1996 TV movie starring Barbara Eden (of I Dream Of Jeanie fame) and William Shatner. Also along for the ride are a host of relatively well-known faces including Roddy McDowell (Cornelius in the Planet of the Apes film series) and Don Most (Ralph Malph in Happy Days). The TV movie is an adaptation by (Columbo writer) Peter S. Fischer of an eponymous book by mystery writer Carolyn Hart.

Ralph Malph himself, alias Don Most.

Henrietta O'Dwyer Collins (Barbara Eden), known simply as "Henrie O.", is a renowned investigative journalist turned biographer. She is summoned to a mysterious island, home to the reclusive millionaire Chase Prescott (William Shatner).


But even before she arrives, a local Native American Indian warns that "Dead Man's Island" is cursed - all who go there are in great danger.


Chase is the head of a huge communications empire. Henrie O. is a former lover of his and tensions remain between the two - but he has set that aside to ask for her help. Someone, he says, is trying to kill him.


Recently, he claims he discovered some of his food was laced with cyanide. One of the small group of people living with him on the island must be the culprit.


Henrie O., pretending to research a new biography of Chase sets about trying to figure out who the guilty party might be. No-one on the island appears to have any nice worlds to say about Chase.

Not long after, and now in Henrie O.'s presence, someone apparently tries to take a shot at the businessman.

After the shots are fired, the investigation takes on a far less covert nature.

A slew of characters, in typical Agatha Christie-like fashion...


...are stuck on the island, from the butler and maid, to a young son and stepson of Chase's, to an actress promised a role by Shatner's character (Valerie St. Vincent, played by Morgan Fairchild), to a young lover, to various employees of the company. All are potential suspects.

Morgan Fairchild

Chase's luxury yacht then explodes...


...with accusations flying even more fervently about who the culprit may be.


[Minor SPOILER warning for this paragraph] Not long after, Chase is electrocuted while swimming. The would-be murderer has evidently succeeded.

Henrie O. interviews everyone on the island learning of inheritances, business dealings and all manner of potentially suspicious affairs.


Meanwhile, a storm is gathering and with the yacht destroyed, there's no way for anyone to leave. And that's where we'll leave it.


So what to make of all this? Having previously seen a rather tacky-looking [minor SPOILER warning for link and below image] "death scene" clip of Dead Man's Island up on YouTube, we, quite frankly, expected this movie to be an amateurish disaster, barely acceptable production values and all the rest of it.


But we found the sample to be mis-representative. Dead Man's Island was indeed a properly-budgeted professional production, shot on 35mm film (not video), properly lit, with decent camera-work, sound and all other technical matters up to standard.

Is the director subtly using the toupee in the shot to suggest that beneath the surface, all is not as it seems?

The writing is OK (not great, but not too bad either). It's a standard whodunit with a twist or two - nothing amazing, but passable. The acting, from a varied ensemble, is pretty good with the most credit undoubtedly due to star Barbara Eden. Her disarming, warm and eminently lovely Southern charm radiates through this entire production; it really is impossible not to like this woman - and that is worth an entire review point in our view!

Barbara Eden

Bill Shatner gives a decent enough performance, and the entire film flows along in reasonably entertaining fashion.


But...something happened in post-production! Something that someone (probably a network "suit") evidently thought was a good idea. It wasn't. It was a disastrously ill-conceived act of poor judgment: the addition of a relentless, annoying, redundant and counter-dramatic voice-over by Henrie. O. at every possible opportunity from the beginning to the end of the movie.

The most inane voice-over ever recorded.

There's no way something like this could have been in the script. The telegraphing of each and every event and motivation that the director is supposed to visualize rendered utterly meaningless by having it said rather than (or usually as well as) shown to the audience via the oldest cheat in the book. After a while, the viewer can't help but feel both patronized and numbed. Almost nothing is revealed in these voice-overs that is of any consequence (one paraphrased example: Chase seemed angry - Deanna Troi would be proud!). Thus, without them, Dead Man's Island might actually be a half-decent film. With them, unfortunately, the same cannot be said.

Add to that a pretty awful, cheap-sounding synthesizer music score, and post-production, which is meant to improve filmed material, has actually ended up almost destroying it. A shame.

Let's move swiftly to the hair...


Bill Shatner is wearing a typical-for-the-time "TJ Curly"; by 1996, this particular style was slowly ebbing towards the end of an era. Yet, Bill Shatner's hair arguably looks very slightly better here than it did in 1994's Star Trek: Generations.


Perhaps this is because Bill Shatner looks in better shape in Dead Man's Island than he looked in Generations. The correlation between weight and toupee believability is something we'll look into in a more detailed post in the future...

Dead Man's Island is indeed replete with moments of toupological note. Interestingly, they are usually bunched up together:

In the above segment, we have a head scratch...


We also have a slightly misshapen toup, unusually rectangular on top, with the hairline also not quite right...


And we also have Bill Shatner's character revealing his suspicions about Henrie O.'s son: "He' got my eyes; my coloring..." Wouldn't the normal thing to say be: "...my eyes, my hair"? The "my eyes" surely makes the "my coloring" part redundant if the character is talking about eye, not hair color. We're not sure what to make of this, but in the clip, after he has said "my coloring", Bill Shatner drops his eyes, as if to suggest the original "my hair" line might have been changed - no-one has Bill Shatner's hair!

My eyes, my coloring...

There are also considerable underwater antics in the movie, with Bill Shatner setting out to top his previous toupological underwater special-effects extravaganza from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (see above link in this paragraph).

In the above scene, Bill Shatner dives, head first towards the camera:


His toupee, Jaws-like, moving closer and closer...


And the actor's toupological confidence doesn't end there. He does some laps too:


We also get to see Bill Shatner's toupee wet outside of the water:


And we even get to see something rather unusual - the actor's hair in a semi-wet, slowly drying state, with harsh hairlines reappearing:


Was the strange swimming costume a distraction from the toupee, or was it deliberately combined with the toupee for an increased "wow" factor?


Dead Man's Island, though replete with poor choices, is still pretty far from a complete disaster. Worth watching? On the whole, we'd say yes.

To paraphrase John Lennon: Above us only toupee...

Unfortunately, Dead Man's Island is not available to buy commercially, though it probably airs from time to time on CBS-affiliated networks in the US. Other than that, it can be found online [note: we did some rather severe hiss reduction on a heavily sound-degraded home video copy we obtained for this review, lest the material would have been almost inaudible. Despite our best efforts, some residual electrical hum remains in the above clips].

The toupee and the whale - part II.

A while back, we examined Bill Shatner's truly breathtaking (from a toupological perspective) underwater antics in the 1986 movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. The scenes in which Bill Shatner, along with his toupee, swam underwater were in a sense so shocking, so audacious and so convincing that for a while cries were heard around the world that Bill Shatner might not even wear a hairpiece at all!


But that's not the end of it. In 2000, possibly equipped with his new "Denny Katz" toup, Bill Shatner set out to top his previous achievement in the program Whale Shark Hunters of the Philippines, which aired on US TV in 2001.


But the stakes would be much, much higher this time. During the production of ST:IV, the actor had the benefit of a closed production, multiple takes if necessary, hairstylists on hand at all times and the general toupological safety-net of the Paramount Pictures backlot if something went wrong with the hair. This time, the setting was the real ocean, the production was a documentary and the whales (whale sharks - in truth more shark than whale) were very real...


But Bill Shatner could afford to be more audacious. His new hair system was evidently far more secure and stable than his 1980s "TJ Curly". Even so, the air of tension building up to the underwater scenes contained in the documentary is palpable. It starts with a brief tease - the toupee is cleverly kept above the water, increasing the sense of audience suspense and anticipation.


Therein follows a long buildup...


The actor appears somewhat pensive and distracted. This is understandable in light of the feat he was preparing for. Weeks, perhaps months of detailed toupological planning were about to be tested.

Like any good stuntman, Bill Shatner gets "into the zone" before a toupee tour de force can begin.

Whale sharks are actually docile filter-feeders, meaning that humans can swim with them at no real risk to themselves. Occasionally, they even allow swimmers to stroke them or hitch a ride.

Bill Shatner, mesmerized by these curiously smooth-skinned (bald) creatures, succeeds in this very task.


And as he swims in the ocean, his hair becomes submerged underwater!


Extraordinary!


But what has hitherto gone unmentioned is how the fish with whom Bill Shatner swam was also mesmerized - by Bill Shatner. The whale shark in question is visibly stunned at the toupological antics that it witnesses. As it swims, its mouth hangs open in shock.


Indeed, it even appears to mouth the word "toupee":

Our "Department of Zoological Toupular Postulate-ology" analyzed the whale shark's on-screen movements and expressions and then, via specially developed technology, succeeded in transcribing this into the form of a past-tense English-language interview:

"Many of us knew and appreciated how this human had helped to bring the plight of whales to the public's attention in the movie Star Trek IV. He'd even been willing to risk his toupee in that film for the sake of marine life! We really don't have anything similar to toupees in the undersea world, although many of us have barnacles growing on our skins, so perhaps that is similar. Anyway, this human and his toupee was of great interest to us."


The whale shark then described his encounter with Bill Shatner:

"I was absolutely breathless - which is particularly notable when you consider that I am a fish and don't even breathe that way. But here I was. Bill Shatner had chosen me to take him and his toupee for a swim. I felt a tremendous sense of honor, but also responsibility. What if something went wrong? What if the toupee started to come loose? But in his physical interaction with me, Bill continued to let me know that it was alright - his toup was strong and I shouldn't worry, so I finally began to enjoy my swim with this unique toupee-wearing and whale-helping human. It really was one of the most moving experiences of my life."


And here's a clip from the show:

It's not the best-made nature program you'll ever see (it has that slight "cheap skateboarding semi-professional video" feel, where you can't help but feel that the on-screen participants are having more fun than the viewer), but it at least succeeds in highlighting the plight of this little-known creature. The program notes that as a result of Whale Shark Hunters of the Philippines, the government of that country banned the hunting and sale of whale sharks (certain footage for the program was filmed in 1998, the same year the ban was implemented). This was followed by several other countries implementing bans too (source).


And indeed Whale Shark Hunters and ST:IV aren't the only examples of Bill Shatner submerging his toupee underwater for the greater good. There's also this from the highly obscure (and by most accounts pretty awful) 1996 TV movie Dead Man's Island (sadly unavailable on DVD):

Whale Shark Hunters of the Philippines is unavailable to purchase, but occasionally airs on the National Geographic Channel.

We'd be remiss if we didn't end by providing a link to the donations page of the World Wildlife Fund as well as mentioning Sea Shepherd and the Center for Biological Diversity.

The toupee liberation.

"Seriously, Leonard. It's this amazing glue - I can actually swim underwater!"

A while back, we examined Bill Shatner's underwater swimming scenes in Star Trek IV - a toupee tour de force, we called them. However, The Voyage Home wasn't the only time that Shats allowed himself to be filmed splashing around in the water, liberated from the fear of being separated from his toup.

In his autobiography Up Till Now, Bill Shatner recalls an environmental film in which an Orca Killer Whale jumped over his head as he swam in the water. We're still trying to determine when this was, but judging from the pictures, it would appear to be not long after 1986's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

Thus, after years of toupees that threatened to unpeel at the front (the lace) or dislodge in public (the weave) this new underwater glue liberated Bill Shatner much like Tim Robbins' character in The Shawshank Redemption (1994).

Free to swim in public!

In 2001, now with totally water-resistant plugs, Bill Shatner again hit the oceans in the documentary Whale Shark Hunters of the Philippines.

And as far back as a 1983 TV special called Battle of the Network Stars we see Bill Shatner getting his hair wet in public, but it is unclear if he was actually able to truly take the plunge at that time.

Any other pictures/examples of Bill Shatner getting his hair wet? Please let us know.

Note: Though we try to bring you all stories related to Shats' toup, we have decided out of respect to Bill Shatner not to publish or link to one particular water-related accusation that was once spread by an in-law. We believe that this claim is totally without merit and deeply hurtful to Bill Shatner. Many of you will know what we are referring to and we will just leave it at that. Now, back to toupology...

The toupee tour de force.

If Shatner's toupee could talk and it was asked to pick one moment where it had exceeded all expectations and risen far above and beyond the call of duty, then it would likely select the underwater scenes in the 1986 movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

More than twenty years on, it is difficult to put into words the impact that Shatner's brief underwater scenes (near the end of the film) had on the world. Three years later, the Berlin Wall was gone and the Soviet Union was nearing collapse.

But just why was this brief scene where Captain Kirk heroically frees a pair of Humpback whales from a sinking Klingon ship such an earth-shattering toupee tour de force? Quite simply, because it caused even the most ardent toupologists to momentarily ask the unthinkable: "Could we have been wrong? That hair looks pretty real."

Just as with many magic tricks, the truth is surprisingly uncomplicated. Firstly, let's not forget that Hollywood, particularly before the days of CGI, had special-effects magicians who could make you believe almost anything you saw was real. Secondly, a toupee you can swim in is actually nothing new at all, especially if you have the magic of Hollywood to help you.

Anyway, Let's go step by step.

Is it really Bill Shatner? Except for one over-the-shoulder-shot where Kirk opens the escape hatch, it is indeed all Shatner underwater (he always loves doing his own stunts wherever possible).

Is it a hairpiece or is it really Shatner's hair? It is definitely a hairpiece; Shats' hair didn't magically grow back, no matter what potion he might have tried. And, if the hair was real, then what the hell were Shatner's hairstylists thinking during so many projects the actor had worked on during the 1970s? Were they trying to make his real hair look fake?

Can we see some bald patches during the swimming? No bald patches are visible since Shatner was completely bald at the top of his head by this time so everything at the top is a full toup. If you photographed a fully-haired person swimming underwater, then you would see the scalp beneath where the hair happens to part as the person swims, because human hair, no matter how thick, does not cover every square millimeter of the head. You see exactly the same effect with Shats, but in his case, the "scalp" beneath an exposed parting is actually the very thin base of the hairpiece to which the artificial hair is attached. Making a toupee base look like a real scalp is really the only way to do it (why would it be blue or red, after all?) and again, it is really a piece of cake for any Hollywood movie hairstylist.

The other question is how the hairpiece was bonded to the scalp in such a convincing and seemingly durable way. Hairpieces in which the wearer can undertake activities such as swimming are actually nothing new. Just watch a James Bond film with Sean Connery or Roger Moore for proof of that. The water tends to ruin them after a while, but for a few shots in a movie - no problem at all. Let's not forget that underwater, the camera tends to see far less detail than it would above-ground and we really don't see that much detail during Shatner's outing, despite a few closeups. As for the fastening, we don't know whether Shats ever had surgery on his scalp to aid hairpiece attachment. The website hairloss.co.uk notes that:

"There can be many benefits to having a permanent wig or toupee, including the decreased risk of the hairpiece falling off during activities and causing embarrassment. With many permanently placed wigs you can swim and take showers without this concern. However, one of the negatives of this is that the wig or toupee can become damaged or faded over time due to chlorine exposure, sun exposure, or repetitive washing. Another downfall of permanent placement wigs is that the application process can be somewhat painful, and in rare cases lead to infections on the scalp or in the hair follicle.

"In order to combat this side effect some wigs are held in place permanently by wire loops that are stitched into the scalp. Others can be permanently attached through a process called 'tunnel grafting'. In this method pieces of skin are cut out and make living loops for the wig. In either case however, cleanliness of the area can become an issue, and some pain or infection can occur. If a permanent type of wig or toupee does not sound right for you, you can look into purchasing its temporary counterpart."

That is an extreme solution, and given continued stories of Shatner's toupee falling off at times, it is unlikely that Shats ever went this far for the sake of a few shots in a movie. The underwater piece was likely attached in a similar way to his regular weave: tie it to his real hair round the back and sides and then secure it with tape or glue at the top. Let's not forget that every movie star, toupeed or not is attended to by hair and makeup people between almost every shot. If the toupee shows, the hair is fixed and another take is filmed. The magic of Hollywood - if only there was an Oscar for "Outstanding Effort or Accomplishment for an Individual Hairpiece in a Motion Picture"...