The Australian Hell

Lost Things (2003)
Directed by Martin Murphy
Screenplay by Stephen Sewell

Hell is a beach in Australia where everything feels vaguely familiar and ominous and where you spend eternity stumbling onto the sight of a drifter going at it doggy-style with that girl you had a crush on and who invited you on this spring break trip only to get you killed. And that drifter might be the devil. Or he might just be the spirit of the guy who killed you and your friends. That’s what I learned from this film.

Gary....Leon Ford (The Pacific)
Brad.....Charlie Garber
Emily....Lenka Kripac (Trouble is a friend of hers)
Tracey....Alex Vaughan
Zippo.....Steve Le Marquand

Cinematography by Justine Kerrigan

Lost Things seemed like it might just be a creepy spring break slasher movie from Oz, but it turned out to be a little more like a spring break slasher movie by Jean Paul Sartre. The whole film is laced with clues that something has already happened and that this is just a form of reenactment.

So the film starts with ominous scenes of Emily’s relationship with an older dude in a camouflage t-shirt and no shoes, none of which make any real sense other than kind of creeping us out about an older guy and a high school girl hooking up. It’s a bad relationship idea and yet you can see why it would happen. It’s not like the guy looks like Bob Hoskins. All of this is brief and impressionistic and the film quickly proceeds to take us on the spring break holiday trip with our four teens in a Volkswagen van. (A combi, in the local lingo.)

The dynamics of gender relations here can be summed up in two moments. One is where they’re lost and trying to figure out where they’re going.
Gary: Boys read maps, girls paint their toenails.

The other is when they’re on the beach and Tracey immediately takes her top off. (She does this not only because this seems to be a typical teens being killed on vacation film but also because the beach is as deserted as the beach in that other Australian classic, On the Beach. The fact that the beach is as abandoned as a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland should be our next clue that this is not just another slasher movie.)
Emily: Are you going to...you know...with Gary?
Tracey: Noooo....but I’m not going to tell him that.
Emily: Are you a tease?
Tracey: Well, why not? If they don’t think they’re gonna get any they’re not interested and as soon as you give it to them they wanna dump you. Why not have a little tease?

This is really as close as this gets to being a typical teen killer movie. The girls are at odds philosophically about their sexuality and get locked in a contest where the guys (who fancy themselves hunters) are merely pawns.
Shortly after the inevitable awkward contest for attention between the girls and the guys the teens are accosted by an older surfer who tells them to get the hell out. This is Zippo and he seems oddly familiar to Emily. Of course, he’s a smelly homeless surfer, but he does bear a resemblance to that shoeless guy in the beginning. That’s when we get the key piece of information that three people died here at this beach and one disappeared. Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky?
Then we get a weird scene where Emily thinks she sees Brad standing on the shore holding a surfboard and just staring out at the ocean. Then Tracey, also by herself sees someone standing on the shore holding a surfboard and staring at the ocean. This is what the afterlife is for Australians.
The rest of the film consists of a constant stream of deja vu and encore deja vu and for some reason the teens find themselves hanging out with Zippo who scares the crap out of everyone by occasionally saying things like “Having a flashback, there?” or “Remember me now?” It’s pretty decent psychological terror here for a while, though you might find yourself thinking "why don't they just drive away and go someplace else?"
Then while they’re sitting around slicing tomatoes for dinner Brad stabs Zippo because he thinks he had a knife and also because Zippo is a scary smelly homeless guy on the beach. (You know, the kind of homeless smelly surfer who's just begging to be stabbed.) Suddenly things take a turn. Or have they? Or did they already take a turn long ago?
Needless to say, no matter what seems to happen on the surface here, things are going on at another level that requires some serious discussion and perhaps a slice of pie. I have to add that this part has some of the best cinematography especially in the dream like shot of an empty beach covered with surfboard sticking out of the sands like porcupine quills (or blades of blood-red grass) and when Zippo stabs Tracey in the back with his ridiculously big knife (Crocodile Dundee would blush at this monster) these drops of red blood trickle on the sand like rubies and the camera lingers for a moment on her hand and the ring which you realize was in the sand when they got there and thus was always there and thus she was already dead before they came here. Yes, for a second this film because something breathtakingly interesting.

At any rate, the moment you finally realize you’re in Australian hell is when Brad seems to have a breakdown where he can see even himself on the beach and then everyone and then no one and then from a distance he can see Emily on all fours being taken from behind by Zippo, right there on the lonely deserted beach. That is Australian hell. (American Hell is slightly different and involves a midget and a walrus at SeaWorld.) When Brad runs up to either stop it (or join in?) we see that Emily is crying, which is possibly the only thing that makes sense by this point in the film. You’d be crying too if that homeless surfer was doing sex to you on a beach. I use the phrase “doing sex” not to be funny, but because I think that’s the only proper way to describe what this action looks like. It is the opposite of “making love” it’s more like “manufacturing hate/resentment.” This whole bit taps into a kind of special horror/terror place in the mind, the kind that if dwelled upon too long will turn into bizarre forms of obsession. I think it’s one thing to think that a homeless (and let's not forget, smelly) surfer named Zippo (who you were pretty sure you stabbed to death last night) will stab you and your friends to death, it’s a whole other thing to imagine that he’s going to come back from the dead just to have his way with that girl you sort of like. That’s really cold. Colder still is the possibility that you were led to this scene by the girl herself. Man, that is cold. That scenario plays into all kinds of fears. It’s one thing to imagine the girl you like with another guy, it’s another to imagine that not only is she going to turn you down and you will accidentally stumble onto them doing it on the beach (and not even in a particularly pleasurable way), but to think that she’s also going to get you stabbed by a smelly homeless surfer named Zippo is a really horrific thought. This is officially the worst spring break ever, at least in Australia.

So, were they dead all along? It would seem so, though it also seems that their initial story has something to do with Emily needing to get something by coming out to the beach with her friends. In the end, they are clearly ghosts on the beach who can’t communicate with the living people who show up on the beach. (Sure, now they show up. Where were they when Zippo was stabbing everyone with that giant knife of his?)

Emily: No one can hear us now, Brad.
Brad: So did you find what you wanted?
Emily: No. I never found it. I never found it at all. All I ever found was you.
This cryptic exchange is followed by a reversion to the scene on the side of the road with the van when they were still on their way to the beach and this is when you realize that THIS is Australian Hell. A special terrible place where everything you see or do seems vaguely familiar and which is populated by four teens and a smelly homeless surfer named Zippo.
I always knew there was something wrong with people who liked to surf, and Zippo has now officially reinforced that prejudice. Surfers are smelly demons who stab people.

So, Lost Things was surprisingly interesting (in a good way) compared to what I was expecting. I mean, it’s not Memento, but it is pretty good and in its own way genuinely horrifying. I also appreciate the fact that this film does not suffer from the Curse of Explainosaurus which demands that every last detail be explained to the audience. In fact, here’s a film that does quite well by explaining almost nothing along the way. I like films that make me think, and this creepy little film made me think. I’m not saying it made me think in the same way that reading Kafka makes me think--well, then again....maybe it does.

As for Lenka Kripac, I like her singing, but she’s a good actor too and if she gets a role as interesting as this I’ll be there to see it. (As long as she’s not typecast as someone who is in thrall to a smelly homeless surfer/the Devil.)

Previews
1. The Evil One
A ghost story about the Chicago World’s Fair killer come back to life and killing again.
2. sideFX
Vampirism is created by a gypsy drug and now it’s back and vampires are running around and spitting up blood all over the place.
Trailers
1. Centipede
Spelunkers are attacked by a centipede. Luckily they aren’t then turned into a human centipede, so we’re safe from that nonsense.
2. Creepies
Creepies: They Multiply!
Genetically mutated spiders (they look more like ticks) kill lots of people.
Ron Jeremy is in this film. Enough said.
Where do you run from hell on 8 legs? Where do you hide?
Where indeed?
3. Street Tales of Terror
Another Tales from the Crypt in the Hood movie. When did Blacksploitation Anthology Horror become its own subgenre?
4. Darkhunters
Dominic Pinon, Jeff Fahey in a film about dead people who don’t stay dead and souls that need to be put to rest with a little help from a girl with a shotgun.
5. The Wickeds
Who robs a grave on Halloween, in the daytime even?
Ron Jeremy does. And that unleashes a bunch of zombies or some sort of thing like that. There should be a rule against having two Ron Jeremy horror movie trailers on the same disc. It sends a really bad message.