DEATH CURSE OF TARTU

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS?

In news that should surprise absolutely no-one, a film which Shock Xpress once listed as one of the fifty most boring movies of all time (and which I freely admit I only watched because Shock Xpress once listed it as one of the fifty most boring movies of all time) turns out to be one of the fifty most boring movies of all time. Cinema has been awash with lousy films throughout its history, and it's true that some of them are fun despite their terribleness (while many claim they're fun precisely because of their terribleness, an argument I've never been entirely convinced by). Many more of them, however, are just simply terrible.

Exhibit 1,568: Death Curse Of Tartu is a (literally) bog-standard horror cheapie from 1966 in which a bunch of utter fools wander around an allegedly cursed Indian burial ground. The legend states clearly that Tartu is a shapeshifting witchdoctor who can transform Manimal-style into any of the local wildlife and wreak hideous vengeance on any who disturb his eternal resting place in a miserable Florida swamp. Four of the group are cardboard teenagers who couldn't spell "archaeology", much less practise it, instead preferring to go swimming in the creek and dance about in their underwear. Eventually Tartu stops manifesting as a snake, shark or alligator, clambers out of his casket and fights the survivors: it doesn't go well for him and then the film stops.

Much of this is indeed cataclysmically boring and its loss to British audiences since the decline of the VHS market (it's never been upgraded to a DVD release in this country) is frankly nothing to get despondent about. Sole point of moderate interest is an orchestral music score which (tribal drums and chanting apart) sounds way too good for a schlocky Z-picture for the bottom half of a drive-in double-bill, and I spent way too much of a limited lifespan trying, without success, to find whether it was tracked in from somewhere else, because it sounds like it cost twice as much as the whole film. The only other note of trivia is that there's a brief shot of a Miami Beach hotel at the end which is the same hotel seen near the start of Goldfinger. Shock Xpress were right. The real curse of Tartu is actually sitting and watching the damned thing.

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