I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

Movies So Bad They Make You Say "What In The Blazes Did I Just Watch?"



Kadaicha (Stones Of Death) 1989 Australia

I know I've mentioned this before, but I am very leery of foreign horror films. Although I have found a few with imagination, good story lines and actors, this was definitely not one of them. Let's start with the title. Kadaicha is the original film title, but apparently no one knew what that word meant, so they changed it to Stones Of Death. Kadaicha does not MEAN Stones Of Death - it is an old word for an Aborigine shaman. And there are no stones. There are crystals if you want to put a fine point on it but...

Australian teenagers ready to die.

Long story short this is a blatant, low budget badly acted Australian ripoff of Poltergeist. We have an almost identical film, except this one sucks and Poltergeist was pretty darn good. We have a new housing development on sacred ground (check), a nice family who we feel sorry for (whoops, not here, just a bunch of rich, spoiled teenagers you want to die immediately), revenge coming from undead spirits (check), neat but still creepy special effects (whoops, wrong again - they were cheesy, cheap and unbelievable), developers knowing they were building on grave sites but did it anyway (check) and a spiritual hero to save the day (check).

This is a stone, right?

Plot as short as I can make it: Developers get rich quick building houses and a shopping mall over a piece of land that, one hundred years ago, was the burial ground of an Aborigine massacre. The spoiled rich teenagers start having dreams of an Aborigine with a skull face who hands them a crystal. Then they die, horribly in this order: Girl - dies from a demon-dog that rips out her throat (not shown, just flashes in different parts of the film since they probably used almost all their special effects money on it), Boy - dies from a spider to the eye (squish... eww but stupid), Girl - dies from a large eel that dreams of being a python.

Don't worry you won't die - you're too ugly.

Okay, the nice, virginal girl gets the next stone. She's the daughter of the developer. So not wanting to die like her friends (but not trying very hard to save them) she goes to Billy Nigel, a full-blood Aborigine who's been in trouble with the law protesting the building. He's a shaman, and please don't ask what's the difference between a shaman and a Kadaicha I don't know and don't care. He reluctantly agrees to help and they find the cave where the Kadaicha, though long dead, has been working his evil.. uh... deeds.

Can't we just play paper, rock, scissors?

She goes home with her boyfriend. In typical shocking-but-not-surprising style of horror movies, her boyfriend becomes 'possessed' by the Kadaicha (the red contact lenses are probably the most expensive special effect they used) and tries to kill her as Billy tries to destroy the... thing. And of course he does in the nick of time. And the street of houses over the sacred grave site now has to be relocated or more will die. The ending scene shows the cave the Kadaicha has been operating from is cemented over... and a black snake makes its way toward the entrance of the storm drain the cave is located in.

Does blood go well with this shirt?

 The duh quotient was through the roof on this one. And that's all I have to say about that.