NZ Horror: The Lost Tribe (John Liang, 1983)

When his twin brother Max disappears, and becomes the chief suspect in a murder inquiry, Edward (John Bach) returns to the site of his brother’s last appearance - a remote island, once home to a tribe which mysteriously disappeared…

Only released in NZ in 1985, The Lost Tribe is one of the New Zealand films I have been most excited to see.

This was one of the films featured in Sam Neill and Judy Rymer’s Cinema of Unease - only one clip featured, but it has haunted me for 20 years.

I finally found a copy of the film, in time for October - the perfect month for viewing.

Written and directed by Jim Liang (Beyond a Reasonable Doubt), the film starts out as whodunit, as the missing Max’s twin is fingered by police for the murder of a sex worker.

Intriguing and atmospheric, The Lost Tribe takes its time, gradually leaving the familiarity of the police procedural behind for something more internal and messy - the family dynamic.

Made more uncanny by the narration (being performed by a child actor in a whisper), The Lost Triberefuses to offer any explanation for the strange goings on - is our protagonist being tormented by the ghosts of the indigenous people whose graves his brother disturbed? Or is the isolated island the perfect catalyst for unleashing deep-seated issues he has tried to bury?

I can see why it was signposted in Cinema of Unease - it is almost the perfect example of Sam Neill’s thesis, as a pakeha man struggles to impose his will upon a land he has no real relationship with.

Once Edward and Ruth are on the island, their deepest desires take over - and as night falls, the island begins to work on them.

While the build up is well-handled, I found the initial supernatural encounter a little lackluster - this might have something to do with watching a copy on YouTube on a laptop. 

There might be something I am missing in terms of the sound design, and exterior night scenes did not come across that well.

The sequence has potential:

Edward and Ruth are under a sense of siege - while they have a gun, it does not provide any sense of security - if anything, it feels like a time bomb, the promise of violence underpinning the couple’s tense dynamic.

The brother’s conflict over the same woman is ultimately more unsettling than the potential supernatural elements 

What does not help is that Edward does not appear to be the most stable person - there is an undercurrent of rage to Bach’s performance, a volatility that stands out in a movie whose forte is understatement.

 When Ruth abandons Edward to patrol the island alone, it feels like a fuse has been lit for some kind of conflagration (it is from this final section of the film that we get the key image lifted by Cinema of Unease: Edward shouting at the forest while brandishing a machete).

While the film has been eerie up until this point, it has started to feel a little listless. 

Now there is a sense of tension, a sense that the film is heading to some unknown destination. While that shot with the machete I mentioned earlier has a certain power, the shot that stuck with me comes shortly afterward - a moving shot of Edward’s feet stomping through his brother’s survey site, nervily hacking through the survey lines.

The film takes a turn for the gothic, with Edward’s discovery of the preserved tribesmen in a cave, and finally a nightmarish confrontation with his brother that raises more questions than it answers:

Is Max real? Was he ever real?

These questions are rendered irrelevant, and the film ends on a perverse family reunion - a mockery of togetherness where none of the underlying tensions have been resolved.

Strikingly photographed and well acted - if a little low key, The Lost Tribe is one film I would love to watch on the big screen - watching it the way I did, I feel like I need another viewing to fully get onboard with it.

Even if it (questionably) does not quite make the landing, it is conceptually fascinating, and it has stuck with me far longer than I expected it to.

Related

Sleeping Dogs 

Bad Taste

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NZ Horror: Bad Taste (Peter Jackson, 1987)

When a small town’s population disappears, the Astro Investigation and Defence Service (Peter Jackson, Terry Potter, Pete O'Herne, Mike Minett and Craig Smith) arrive to investigate. 

They are soon pitched into battle with the forces of Lord Crumb (Doug Wren and Peter Vere-Jones), an alien fast food mogul who wants human flesh for his products. 

To celebrate the season, I am focusing on New Zealand genre movies. This is part of a more general push towards covering more local films next year.

This year, I have been testing out themed months to break the blog out of the same genres.

This month’s theme was also an excuse to cover a clutch of movies I have never seen.

I have seen most of the key texts (Utu, Braindead) but New Zealand genre cinema is not something I have dived into with any depth.

It is an excuse to finally tick off a film I should have covered years ago.

Peter Jackson was a major filmmaker of my youth - I came back to live in New Zealand around the time he had started LOTR, so that whole arc of his success was happening around the time I was getting more interested in movies, and it felt like New Zealand culture was becoming more open to the industry.

The handmade qualities of Bad Taste  - the guns, masks and prosthetics, and the cast of friends playing a cast of dozens - are key. This sense of imagination and how it is pulled off gives Bad Taste its unique energy.

I read about its production in Ian Pryor’s unauthorised biography 20-something years ago, and that knowledge of its making does not take away from the overall effect - it only enhances it.

The film does not take its time getting to the goods, starting with roving camerawork and an impressively grue-y puppet of a headless corpse.

Assembled over four years, the story-telling is ragged, but it is so unpredictable, and keeps introducing new ideas with so much style, it just about carries it off.

The characters are a collection of weirdos: Jackson himself plays multiple roles, including the vague protagonist Derek, a nerdy alien scientist who becomes a deranged killer - he wears a Rambo-esque band to keep his brain in his fractured skull. He also plays Robert, a hulking brute who is the major muscle of the aliens, but proves to be less savvy as a fighter (in one of the most inspired setpieces, these characters fight each other).

There are a few dull patches, and aside from Jackson’s outsized turn, the acting is rote. 

You have to allow for the fact this is a group of friends, and to the film’s credit, that chemistry is clear - and there is a catharsis to watching this group of friends pull the movie off.

The occasional fan reference (a sign points toward Stephen King’s Castle Rock) adds to the film as a gumbo that turns into something original.

Considering where Jackson’s career ended up, there is a certain poignancy to the film - its scrappy sense of independence and invention almost feel like a repudiation of his latter career.

So many films have tried to take influence from its delightfully anarchic approach to genre, violence and humour, but there is an outsider quality, an incredibly clear sense of individuality to Bad Taste, that keeps it unique. 

Related

Sleeping Dogs

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you enjoy something I wrote, and want to support my writing, here’s a link for tips!

NZ Horror: Sleeping Dogs (Roger Donaldson, 1977)

After discovering his wife (Nevan Rowe) has had an affair with his best friend (Ian Mune), Smith (Sam Neill) abandons his family for a deserted island.

While Smith returns to land from exile, he finds the world he left behind has changed:

Spurred on by industrial unrest and some false flag actions, the New Zealand government has become a dictatorship, with an armed resistance movement and American military ‘advisors’ on-hand to fight them.

When he is arrested by the regime, Smith is forced to go on the run as a fugitive,

A resistance fighter by circumstance, will Smith have what it takes to save his family - and his country?

To celebrate the spooky season, The Midnight Ramble will be exploring a cinematic region it has only sparingly covered: New Zealand horror and genre cinema.

To inaugurate this programme, we start with Roger Donaldson’s nightmare vision of a near-future dystopia.

While modest on its own terms, Sleeping Dogs marked a landmark in New Zealand film when it was released in 1977.

The first New Zealand feature in over a decade (since John O’Shea’s Don’t Let It Get You), its success - along with new works by other filmmakers like Geoff Murphy - led to the creation of the New Zealand Film Commission.

I read the source novel, Smith’s Dream, as a teen. I was interested in alternative history and dystopian fiction, and it was one of the few local examples of the genre.

I watched Sleeping Dogs around the same time and remember being underwhelmed by it.

After Sam Neill passed away, I wanted to give it another look.

In light of the government’s increasingly authoritarian bent - and the US’s dropping its mask around the rules-based international order - it also felt appropriate for a reappraisal.

Written as an anti-Vietnam allegory, that message is somewhat muffled in the transition to film.

In its favour, Sleeping Dogs features some good photography, and some solid attempts at suspense.

However, the script is awash in cliches, aiming for a New Holllywood-style cynicism, but coming off as a vaguely competent action thriller.

The local cast range from fine to wooden: Neill would rubbish his performance but his unease is belayed by an inherent charisma.

American import Warren Oates adds some welcome swagger as an special forces commander who befriends Smith.

An important film in the history of NZ film, and an early showcase for future luminaries.

On its own terms, Sleeping Dogs is a crude but occasionally effective thriller.

With the direction NZ and world politics have taken in recent years, the film has a new sense of urgency that has more danger than the Muldoon-era fable was intended to evoke.

Related

Mārama

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you enjoy something I wrote, and want to support my writing, here’s a link for tips!

NZIFF: Remake (Ross McElwee, 2025)

With most of the films I saw at the NZ International Film Festival this year, I had almost no context going in. I only picked two films to watch, so I relied on my usher schedule to dictate what else I would write about.

McElwee directed Sherman’s March, a documentary I have been meaning to see for years.

Whenever I get to it, this film is going to hang over it. Indeed, this film will loom over his entire career. 

Remake is based around an attempt to adapt Sherman’s March into a feature film, and the death of Ross’s son Adrian (1989-2016), whose life had been partially documented through his father’s work.

A reflection on Ross’ss career, and relationship with his family, Remake is made up of footage from his previous films, and footage his son shot for his own unfinished project. 

Filmmaking is about control and choice - what we show and what we do not.

In going through his footage, and his motivations behind his choices, the filmmaker is trying to reckon with his career, and his relationship with his son.

Halfway through the film, it begins to condense in time, moving through all the footage Ross has covering the year leading up to his son’s death.

The ellipses of the footage mirror Ross’s sense of loss and desire to know more about his son’s internal life, and the life that was not captured on camera.

One sequence of Adrian’s footage included is a to-camera monologue his son shot, a familiar format for addressing the viewer - however, the younger McElwee forgot to record sound. So all we have is Adrian silently mouthing words at us - another avenue into knowing denied.

Another sequence  is made up of extended POV shots his son recorded while skiing.

Ross says it gives him a stronger sense of alignment - when Adrian/the camera stops in a clearing to survey the surroundings, Ross, as narrator, hypothesising on his son’s train of thought.

The elder McElwee shows some fear that his camera turned his son into an object, and put him at a distance from his family - now this footage is all he has.

Ross’s narration, the last element, the filmmaker’s attempt to provide context and understand, is ultimately a document of helplessness, regret and self-interrogation

As the film progresses, the lack of footage filmed by Ross himself becomes a metaphor for the changing relationship between parent and child - his son made his own choices, and he grew up into someone else.

A reflection on time, regret, and human subjectivity, Remake is a quietly devastating work - an act of cinematic self-laceration that by its very specificity, reaches toward a deeper human truth, one that haunts its filmmaker (and the viewer): the ultimate unknowability of the individual human experience.

Related

Prosecution

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Seoul Guardians

The History of Concrete

Late Fame