A group of Australian teens have a problem; they are each having the same dream about a tunnel leading to a torchlit chamber covered in aboriginal markings, where a tall figure is chanting. The figure turns, revealing it is a rotting corpse, and it forces something into their hand before they wake in fright. Upon awakening, they find a kadaicha, a crystal inscribed with, again, aboriginal markings. And whoever finds a kadaicha will die within 24 hours.
There’s a whole lot of familiar tropes in this movie, made four years after Nightmare on Elm Street, and possessing many of the markings of it and its imitators. Our main character, Gail (Zoe Carides) is the daughter of the real estate hustler who masterminded this plagued locale, and as she researches the cause of her friends’ death (and eventually her own imminent doom), she finds the development is built over, basically, an Indian graveyard.
To its credit, the movie makes it a little more than that, with an eye towards Australia’s troubled history. There was a massacre and then a counter-massacre, then a counter-counter massacre, and there are some very angry bones in that chamber. Gail finds there were many indigenous protests about the development, but dear old dad basically just bricked up the hole to the chamber and built over it.
So the neat twist is that the aboriginals weren’t threatening the development with ghostly retribution – they were trying to warn whitey not to do it, because they knew the place was cursed with a capital K.
Kadaicha – eventually re-titled Stones of Death – keeps its political outrage simmering just under the surface, a vital difference making it watchable as more than a Nightmare wannabe. Director James Bogle manages, in between the typical teen cut-ups, to craft some some nicely weird sequences – the spider POV is especially nice – and turned out an effective little thriller.
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