Kadaicha: La pierre de la mort

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.

Kadaicha are ancient Aborigine stones whose hellish curse reaches from beyond the grave.Anyone receiving such a stone is doomed to die in terrifying circumstances.A group of local teenagers are each experiencing the same nightmarish dream about an eerie cave with sinister rock paintings and the brooding evil which dwells within.Each awakens to find an evil stone lying coldly next to them...The plot sounds really good,but the film is only decent.There are some gruesome death scenes like the spider sequence in the library,and the score is suitably creepy and menacing.7 out of 10-okay horror film!

Australian horror Kadaicha is a little bit Poltergeist and a little bit A Nightmare on Elm Street, but - and this probably goes without saying - it is not as good as either of those classics.

The film opens as a teenage girl wakes from a nightmare to find a strange crystal in her hand. At Kangaloola High, her teacher identifies the stone as a Kadaicha, which was given by Aboriginal shamen to people condemned to die; sure enough, the girl is found dead soon after, seemingly attacked by a wild animal. Other students share similar inexplicable fates, leaving Gail Sorensen (Zoe Carides) to try and find out how to stop the curse before she becomes the latest victim.

It eventually transpires that the Kangaloola estate was constructed on the site of an ancient Aboriginal burial ground (that old chestnut), Gail's father, the developer, having ignored the discovery while building was in progress. This lack of originality is matched by the lack of suspense and absence of genuine horror, the death scenes being rather unimaginative and light on gore (if the film had matched the creativity of A Nightmare on Elm Street's inventive kills, it would have been a lot more memorable).

The rushed and underwhelming finale sees Gail recruiting a local Aboriginal magic man to fight the power of the Kadaicha in an unremarkable battle of good against evil.

3.5/10, generously rounded up to 4 for IMDb.

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

Residents of a small housing development are being butchered off after finding strange rocks on themselves. Seems that the houses were built upon an old graveyard. Low budgeted flick has an interesting enough premise, but falls very short of its goals mainly due to an extremely low budget, shoddy camera work and a weak, below par cast. Rated R; Violence.