Friday, October 24, 2014

The Threat of Ancient Echoes - THE LOST TRIBE (1983)


New Zealand hasn't come to be a horror powerhouse in world cinema, despite the best efforts of the young Peter Jackson with Bad Taste and the priceless Dead Alive.  Aside from Petey Kiwi the only NZ horror movies I can remember while writing this are the direct-to-video demon flick The Devil's Rock (pretty dang good if you ask me) and that Dark of the Night/Mr. Wrong movie I wrote about last year.  The one's you're thinking of are probably Australian, anyways, and both countries often have their funding held at the whim of national film boards that might not be too into funding chop-'em-ups.  The only reason the similarly Commonwealthy Canada churned out so many B-movies in the 70's and 80's is that directors exploited tax loopholes, an era that went the way of the zombie dodo decades ago.  That being said one little gem did escape into the North American video market many blood moons ago, The Lost Tribe, written and directed by John Laing (whose career slid into TV soon after and held to the small screen with an iron grip).

Anthropologist Max Scarry (John Bach) mysteriously disappears while doing excavation/research of a lost New Zealand tribe on a remote island.  His wife and his twin brother Edward are clueless as to what could have happened, a situation complicated by their city's police suspecting that one of the brothers murdered a local prostitute who was found with a strange tribal charm on her body matching one found in Max's abandoned hut.  What most certainly isn't helping matters is the strange behavior of Max's daughter as she seems to have visions beyond possibility, warnings of a supernatural threat and her uncle's fate - and she's the film's narrator, to boot.  After a suspicious run-in with the cops and another prostitute, Edward decides to go to the island to find out exactly what happened, but the deeper he goes into the mystery the more perilous and unknowable his world becomes, leading towards a shocking fate that raises more questions than it answers.

While The Lost Tribe might sound a bit also-ran on paper - extinct tribe, unexplained psychic visions, identical twins - the execution is extraordinarily brooding and engrossing, burning slow and thoroughly until we can't help but be afraid.  From the very first shot - a fast approach on the water to an arriving boat, a la the cargo ship introduction from NosferatuThe Lost Tribe is incredibly well-shot, full of rich color contrast and noir-ish shadowplay.  Faces are often deftly underlit, echoing old-school horror tricks without sacrificing the deadly serious tone.  Late in the film there is a seeming dream sequence that is one of the most unnerving I've seen in any horror movie, not least because of how strikingly different it is from everything we've seen before.  Key to this film's success is the performance of John Bach as Edward, an unsettlingly shifty, glaring man with secrets both unspoken and possibly unspeakable.  Unlike many horror protagonists who bland along in an attempt to give audiences someone to feel sorry for, Edward Scarry begs the audience to decipher him, and once the final scenes pull the rug out from everything we're left wondering just what kind of men these brothers truly were.  Tribe moves at its own pace and asks its own questions, and once everything is said and done it ultimately might not sound like a horror movie, but damned if I know what else it could be.  Sure, it's a mystery, but plenty of horror movies are structured that way and Tribe lets its unknowns hang in the air so thick they can be cut with a knife, and ultimately this fog trails behind the viewer as they shuffle back to their cars in a state of confusion and subterranean fear.


Only released theatrically in New Zealand, it's not hard to see why The Lost Tribe has flown under the radar for the past thirty years.  It's only North American video release was on the obscure Fox Hills Video label, a small-time cousin to Media Home Video via their parent company Heron Communications, and I so rarely come across any tapes from the firm that I'm not surprised the film didn't make it to too many renters' VCR's.  One can sense panic on the part of the distributors to jazz up what they probably considered DOA, as the poster and box sport the name-recognition-grabbing tagline "ALTERED STATES.  DEADLY FATES."  That's a shame, because it's one of the most interesting takes on the "ancient tribe" subset of horror movies and doesn't need any help from Altered States or any other Hollywood hit.  I can't recommend you pair it with Dark of the Night, though, but I'm sure you guys are industrious enough to think of some way to work it into one of your (hopefully) annual Halloween horror marathons.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any clips of the film on YouTube but there are some pretty cheap copies on Amazon (though none for a penny, sadly), and you can even see an embarrassingly over-the-top review I did for it some years ago when I didn't know what restraint was.  I will warn you that Tribe is paced very slowly, so if you're hoping for plenty of tentpole horror setpieces it'll leave you in the dust.  For those with patience and a taste for a dark, atmospheric horror mystery The Lost Tribe delivers in spades, and it makes me want to uncover more kiwi fright flicks to shake up All Hallow's Eve-athons.

~PNK

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