Reviewed by
Christopher Armstead
This movie here is called ‘The Lost Tribe’. This is the real movie. Not that fake movie calling itself ‘The Tribe’ or ‘The Forgotten Ones’ or ‘After Dusk, They Come’ that we discussed here however long ago. This one is the real one. Sure both movies are almost identical featuring stories about five people on a boat ride, ending up on a deserted island, meeting up with some crazed Neanderthals with amazing jumping ability with just about everybody dying, pretty much in the same way, but this is the real one. There’s a history behind both of these which we’re not going to get all into but if ‘The Tribe’ was made to better or fix what was conceived as truly awful in ‘The Forgotten Ones’… then perhaps there was a better use of money, cast, location and Lance Henricksen because, at least in my opinion, ‘The Lost Tribe’ really struggles to equal what we saw in ‘The Tribe’. Personally I would’ve just hired more chicks, had more nudity and made me a wacky teenage sex comedy with jumping Neanderthals. That’s a movie worth seeing.
Let’s compare the two as we rush through this. This movie features more responsible, less irritating young adults who will eventually shipwreck on a seemingly deserted island and get themselves slaughtered. The fat guy in this movie was way better than the fat guy in that last movie, while the final girl in that other movie was superior to Emily Foxler in this movie even though Emily Foxler is arguably a little cuter than Jewel Saite. The rest of the characters are completely interchangeable.
In this movie we see things from the monsters POV in Predator Vision since neither set of monsters can see body heat. Our heroes get snatched, murdered, eaten or what not with this movie punctuated by some of the most obnoxious monster grunts and groans and wheezes that you will ever want to hear. The thing is that our cast never reacted to all of these wickedly obnoxious monster grunts and groans and wheezes.
This version did have better cinematography provided by director Roel Reine but both movies pretty much end the same with our final women engaged in death battles against the chief monster, though we liked the approach taken in the first movie better than in this one.
The big change for this movie, the thing separates this movie from the ‘The Forgotten Ones’ and I guess required a do-over is Lance Henricksen playing a catholic priest / assassin sent to crush rock solid proof of The Origin of Species. Apparently the skull of the Missing Link has been found and it turns out the evil Catholic Church and some guy called The Pope is deathly afraid of Darwin’s theories being proven and folks will thusly stop tithing, destroying religion forever. That’s the big change. Considering there’s a large population of parishioners out there that believe that the skeletal remains of dinosaurs is a satanic hoax, I’m thinking were good and murderous priests are unnecessary. I’m of the mindset that these same people aren’t going to take the discovery of an oblong skull in the dirt, in the middle of an island in the pacific, as proof positive of the fallacy of God. I’ve seen some pretty darn ridiculous plot devices in movies before, but this is one of the craziest. And even though it is crazy, it wouldn’t have been so bad if they had actually used this crazy plot point for something outside of squeezing Lance Henricksen in the movie for three minutes. Now if we had a squad of Catholic priest / hitmen doing battle against the Missing Link monsters with Predator Vision in the middle of a wacky teen sex comedy? That would’ve been sweet.
The bottom line in all of this is that ‘The Lost Tribe’ is a sub-mediocre horror flick just like ‘After Dusk, They Come’ was a sub-mediocre horror flick. If one was to put a gun to my head and make me choose which one to watch again, because that’s what it would take, I would choose the first movie. The monsters were cooler and had a little more personality and there were no evil Catholics walking around shooting people in the face. But if that mean person holding this gun to my head were to take that gun away, I would probably just opt to watch… I don’t know… anything other than watch either ‘The Tribe’ or ‘The Lost Tribe’ one more time again.
