Stones of Death

STONES OF DEATH as the old rental tape of this film is titled is a pretty competent if somewhat lackluster Australian made teen horror film that plumbs it's material from two American made hits of 80s horror fare: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET and POLTERGEIST. Throw in a diggeredoo soundtrack and intrigue about native Aboriginal customs and there you have it. The plot centers on a group of high school friends (all appearing to be about 22 - 25 years old, actually) who start having disturbing nightmares involving creepy native Aborigines who apparently live in the sewers beneath their trendy sea-side modern day housing community. One by one the kids have identical visions and awake to find a native Kadaicha -- some sort of Aboriginal death stone crystal -- on their pillows, then are invariably killed in somewhat unique methods that all seem to involve demonic or possessed animals.

The standout sequence is when one of the guys from the pack of friends does some late night studying in the library and gets too close of a look at a bizarre spider that gloms onto one of his eyes like the face hugger from ALIEN. One of the girls has a somewhat gruesome encounter with a lawnmower after being chased by a dog, and another is pulled to her doom by a giant snake (unseen for the most part, which is too bad: I love snake horror) when the surviving pack of friends decide it would be a really good idea to go for a swim even though they are being killed off one by one. Teen agers will be stupid the world over, I guess, and a somewhat awkward subplot about the guys being guitarists in the school rock band seems more like an effort to spice the film up with some rock & roll rather than genuine character attributes.

The kids are behavioral studies rather than actual people, and for the most part played by attractive young Aussie actors who's parents are even more attractive (one of the dads has a really hot date with a total babe in a dress that she looked poured into: how'd he meet her??) and not much older. By contrast the local native Aboriginal descendants come across as unique, insightful and spiritual people, suggesting to me that this film actually has a social agenda about blaming the woes of the world on wealthy Caucasians who screw up everything nature has to offer by building unwanted housing developments in unfortunate places. Borrowing from POLTERGEIST, the housing community has been built on the site of native Aboriginal burial grounds, and the spirits of the dead aren't too happy about it.

Conveniently though one of the local natives is the descendant of a shaman or religious specialist in Aboriginal culture and he agrees to help the kids out of their jam by staging a ritual down in the sewers to purge the malevolence from the skeletons of the dead. He gets dressed up with the stereotypical face makeup with a rattle & shakes his bag of bones at the skeletons while lighting effects and diggeredoo music drones on ominously. This would be the Aussie equivalent of having a horror movie Injun Medicine Chief agree to help the White Man suppress an angry Wendigo, suggesting to me a sort of attitude of duality towards the natives by the filmmakers that stops just short of being racist in nature. It's more sort of slack-jawed and stupid than offensively demeaning, however, regarding the old shaman with a kind of awe that in the later 1980s age of Peter Gabriel type fascination with 3rd world cultures was very fashionable at the time.

The film was written by Ian Coughlin, an Australian who had previously made the interesting if also somewhat understated ALLISON'S BIRTHDAY, a ROSEMARY'S BABY ripoff that likewise demonstrates Coughlin's admiration for Americanized horror conventions. With a bit more zest in the form of some nudity or more explicit gore this effort might have proved to be more commercial than his previous horror film, but sadly the movie is perhaps too low keyed for it's own good -- Aside from a couple of interesting shocks and a lame attempt at "An American Werewolf In London" style dead friends humor towards the end there isn't anything too remarkable, though the film is very well made and not as boring as some might let on.

Recommended for fans of 1980s teen horror, and even though it's somewhat derivative it's Australian roots defy the traditional predictable formulas of the idiom's usual fare. It's also incredibly obscure in North America, prior rental tapes are your best bet for finding a copy though you may have to look high & low before finding one.

5/10

Plot: Residents living on land built on an ancient burial ground die after finding strange stones.

Kadaicha started off looking very promising but as time went on, didn't seem to go anywhere at all. It started to meander too much and take too long to reach the conclusion. The acting was very good for this type of movie (compared to most low budget horror flicks), but the deaths weren't very gory and the ending was rather dull.

Overall I feel this film could have been much more interesting as the storyline itself was quite good. Sadly it's just too boring - I wouldn't recommend seeking this out unless you're a collector.

4/10

Every once in a while Australia produces a good straight-up horror-movie (not really considering many fine ozploitation genre-mixtures with this statement). RAZORBACK, a fine monster-movie for example. KADAICHA, however, isn't really one of those excellent horror gems. The teenage inhabitants of one particular street in a suburban area get in deadly trouble when the spirit of an ancient Aboriginal voodoo-priest wants revenge. Aparantly the houses in that street were build on an Aboriginal burial ground (what else did you expect?). The spirit of the voodoo-priest manifests itself through animals. This flick is amusing at times and gets a little boring and pretty bad at others. A 'didgeridoo' seems to be a horrifying instrument, because it can be heard on the soundtrack every time something supposedly scary is about to happen. I'll give KADAICHA some extra points because it tries hard, and the death-by-spider scene was amusing. But you'll have to be in the mood for it when you watch this stuff, otherwise you might dismiss it as nonsensical crap.

I saw this film once late at night when it was played on television. It really isn't at all good, and I don't recommend it, but for me it was one of those films with a really strange feel about it. I can't remember too much of the film because I saw it so long ago but it had a strange feel about it which I enjoyed.

All I can remember of the plot is that if you find this Aboriginal stone on your pillow when you wake up, you are cursed and will die. Now, I think the reason for this is that these people live in an area over sacred Aboriginal ground, and the Aborigines have cursed the people who live there. Totally absurd I know, but there are a few gruesome deaths, one nasty one with a spider.

If you can find it, have a look, but its not that great. A silly look at Aboriginality, because I don't think Aborigines would be that way inclined.

Australia's answer to the first two POLTERGEIST films with a couple teaspoons of NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. Now give it a stir. You get the same sort of supernatural story, pinching plot details here and there (damn those greedy building developers), as the outskirts of suburbia meets Indigenous dreamtime horror. A group teenagers living on the same street in a suburban housing development find themselves haunted by the spirit of a Kadaicha Man (an elder aboriginal witchdoctor) through their dreams, which when they awake, they are in possession of an ancient crystal stone. This souvenir symbolizes that they are targeted for death.

To begin teenagers are killed off one by one in what looks like freak accidents caused by dangerous wildlife (and the body count is very small), while minimalistic in execution with its tame use of cutaways and aftermath mutilation; there's a charm to these coarse attacks and decent effects. Outside the slightly eerie first death, I thought remaining lot were silly. Still the natural sound design along with the piercing didgeridoo / synth score do a better job implementing the uneasy atmospherics around the thrills.

Obvious plot tropes are used to advance the story, engineer the threat and to keep you invested, yet for the majority of the time these docile characters seem less concern in trying to figure out how not to become the next victim. Some of their actions are questionable, even their own state of mind when they begin dropping like flies. Then at the backend the material rushes through and decides to throw out the overt shocks, changing its M.O to ghostly apparitions, poltergeist activity and possession leading to a flimsy power play over the life of the final girl. It's everything, but the kitchen sink... done on the cheap. Stereotypical performances don't hurt and the script might not be the greatest, but you get amusing lines like this;

"A dog savage enough to kill a teenage girl. A spider with the fasted venom in history and now a giant eel that thinks it's a boa constrictor. What... the hell... is going... on?????"

The delivery of the line was just priceless. Actually a lot of the choice dialogues, and sincere banter, especially between the coppers got a laugh from me.

Not the best Ozploitation had to offer, quite clunky, but you could do a lot worse.