Perhaps you read William Golding's Lord of the Flies, or maybe you've seen Peter Brook's intense film of the book made in 1963. It's a familiar story, a parable of civilization and savagery, revisited in 1990 by Castle Rock and director Henry Hook, who is also the film's editor. Hook and his crew have the unenviable task of making a movie that will inevitably fall short in the comparisons to the previous tellings of the same story, but they're game.

A group of pre-adolescent students from a military academy survive a plane crash over the ocean, and wash up on a deserted island. The twenty or so boys are left to fend for themselves ; to find food, shelter. (In Golding's novel, the boys are British; here, they're American.) Things quickly turn ugly, however, as infighting among the boys increases as the stakes grow greater ; will they make it on the island? Will they catch the wild pigs that run amok? Will the order drilled into them in military school survive in the wild? Ralph (Balthazar Getty) is the nominal leader, but Jack (Chris Furrh) is the wild man, the empire builder ; eventually his renegade band breaks off from the rest, and island life is made that much more difficult by the ensuing civil war. Danuel Pipoly is Piggy, the perpetual victim with the brutal nickname ; he's valuable to the others principally because he wears glasses, and the boys use the lenses to generate fire in the old Boy Scout method, reflecting sunlight. (Does this genuinely work? Or is it just a movie convention? It happens in milliseconds here.) Maybe this is a little harsh, but with these pre-adolescent boys running around in their underwear, much of the movie plays out as "Survivor" crossed with an Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue. One of the big problems is that the child actors aren't very good, or that Hook doesn't elicit convincing performances from them. (Also, he doesn't do a very good job of differentiating the characters, giving us some visual or story clues to separate them out ; they blend into one another, and with the exception of the principal trio, are very difficult to keep straight.) Some of the acting is better in quiet moments -- for instance, when Ralph tries to comfort Piggy, who's being picked on: "It's just because you're new." The reply is heartbreaking: "No, it's always this way." Sara Schiff's spare screenplay is at its best when the boys are in action, especially in the efficient set-up of the story, but the dialogue scenes ; there are more of them as the film goes on ; are generally unconvincing. Besides the transfer of the boys to the U.S., a couple of the dollops of contemporaneity are pretty effective, actually ; these are a bunch of foul-mouthed fellows, and one is sure that he can lead because "my brother did Outward Bound." Island life doesn't take much of a toll on them physically, which is surprising ; maybe it's having seen "Cast Away," but there's mileage to be had in figuring out early on just how they're going to take care of the day-to-day business of living. Though I suppose there isn't much room for that in Golding's parable about the beast within each of us. The descent into savagery is by the book, and Piggy gets all the dialogue designed to underline the points being made: "We did everything just the way grown-ups would have. Why didn't it work?" It's too bad that Hook includes these obvious moments, because he's so much better at showing us than telling us, which is as it should be.

Picture: The island looks pretty lush, and the filmmakers take advantage of their tropical locale. (They seem particularly fond of extreme close-ups of exotic lizards.) It's not shot with any particular flair, though; cinematography is workmanlike, and the transfer to DVD is reasonably good, preserving the saturated greens of the jungle and the intense oranges of the fire. Sound: Lots of loud music, and many of the cues anticipate story points. The mix is a decent if unimpressive one.

Nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada. Not even a trailer. Did I mention that there are no extras?

The DVD comes at a bargain-basement price of $14.95, and if you're a devoted fan of the novel, it's interesting viewing, at least. It passes ninety minutes pretty handily, but there's not a whole lot more to look at on this bare-bones release.