Bullet Points: The Lost Tribe (2010)
Algorithms can sometimes be spot on. These streaming services are always trying to recommend movies to me that I have absolutely no interest in but anytime I see something that so closely resembles Predator, my curiously is piqued. Tubi did that recently and flashed The Lost Tribe across my screen and it only took about 3 seconds for me to make my choice. It sure beats scrolling around for 25 minutes….
- The low down: The film opens with an archeological dig on an island. They find some wildly huge skull and all the white folk are in awe/excited for the find. We also get a brief scene of the Catholic church preparing to send a team to the dig site. It seems like there used to be a lot of storylines like this back in the day but big corporations have taken over for the big churches as villains. We, at least, get a minute or two with genre legend Lance Henriksen as he leads a military team to the island. They find the girl and question her but Lance wastes no time putting a bullet in her brain.
- Too much going on: There is a fair amount of time spent with our boat-full of people who are most assuredly going to die. Each of them has their own little stereotype to them (the ditzy blonde, the partier Brit, the jock boyfriend, rich guy) but that actually helps when it comes to the amount of time we need to spend with each of them. It seems the Catholic bits are quickly dropped as soon their yacht is sunk and they are washed ashore, things get spooky and we’re just waiting for the first death. Lots of setup that really ends up going nowhere.
- All the homages: The Lost Tribe isn’t afraid to pretend to be Predator. It’s a movie after my own heart. They have a predator vision, of sorts, and a character sneaks up on someone using the line “over here”. It’s two of my favorite parts in the film and there are surely other points where the movie does its best impression of the classic.
- A fate worse than death: The group of poor, stranded white people don’t stand much of a chance but we soon find out that these creatures are super into torture. They start picking them off one by one until only one gal is around to scream. The scariest part is when the creatures start looking at her a bit longingly. So much for romance.
- Survival at all costs: We get so many nods to Predator here that I was feeling a bit of heaven. That nostalgic part of my body was quivering like a 17 year old girl at prom. Emily Baldoni or Emily Foxler, plays Anna, the lone survivor and badass chick who must have seen Major Dutch evade a certain alien a time or two. The tension ramps up as Anna covers herself and muck and attempts to find and rescue her jock boyfriend.
- A terrible game of hide and seek: The not-so-evolved creatures running around the island don’t seem to have the honorable hunting for a prize gimmick that the Predators have. The leader appears to have a few other things on his mind and one can’t really blame him for it. A chase scene and a few killings later and we’re off to the finish.
The Verdict: I’m sitting here in utter disbelief at how much I enjoyed that movie. It isn’t the type of film that is going to crack your Top 10 or anything, but the expectations and the results couldn’t be further from one another. The film does its best to be a Predator-lite, which is a very good thing, but it also does it with the understanding that we’re not dealing with a big budget and thousands of blanks for the machine guns. The hero in this one has to use her wits more than just her brawn. Of course there are some missed opportunities with the minimal use of Lance Henriksen and the soldiers (just give me one good action sequence) and it does take a while to get to killing, but The Lost Tribe destroyed what expectations I had for it. What a rare find. Check it out on Tubi and see if I’m wrong.
