German DVD Artwork
A group of friends head out onto the open seas in a yacht heading for a party destination when an off-course GPS leads them directly into shallow waters, smashing their vessel into a reef, forcing them to abandon ship and take refuge on a small island, far of the beaten path and out of coast guard range. With no other choice but to settle in until help arrives, the unwary castaways quickly discover that they’re not the only ones on the island. Something lurks within the jungle, high above their heads, watching, waiting.
As the overseas artwork suggests, this is indeed in the tradition of Predator and The Descent, meaning it’s filmed in a jungle with tree-dwelling, sub-human creatures (like Predator) and eventually ends up in a series of underground caverns where a solitary heroine is forced to make her final stand (like The Descent). In other words, it’s a rip-off. As the final credits scrolled I found myself quite surprised by the filmmakers blatant attempt to copy The Descent, and not in a cheesy mockbuster way either. This flick was so bad the filmmakers remade it themselves with a new script, director and cast! That just might be a cinematic record.
The Tribe (previously The Forgotten Ones and reportedly shot in 2006) is undoubtedly SyFy Channel fare all the way because it’s just barely tolerable enough to watch, like so many SyFy premiers, and will probably leave you feeling a bit unsatisfied, perhaps cheated and perhaps even downright enraged. Sci-fi TV darling Jewel Staite is a decent actress and good looking to boot but leading lady material, in my opinion, she is not. There was no warmth to her character at all, it was very hard to like her at all, though admittedly she was the best actor in this film so she wasn’t entirely unlikable either. The other characters were all such complete shallow assholes and douchebags, it’s hard not to like Staite, no matter how wooden and bland she is.
The scoring in this film was hideous, the music was either way too loud or way too frequent (and therefore obnoxious). I can’t say the cinematography was all that bad but nobody will be blown away by it. There were a few sequences of blood and gore, no nudity though, and the creatures were visually impressive but very little can save this film from being just plain bad. I completely understand why the producers and crew wanted to remake this film but I don’t hold out much hope for their remake, which is already being titled The Tribe 2 overseas.
“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
I was hugely disappointed in the predictability of this film but there’s so much more wrong with this production than just knowing how it’s all going to end that made this intolerable. It was everything from the script and directing right on down to the dialogue and performances, nothing worked for me, nothing entertained me. This was an exercise in patience that I almost lost several times as my mind kept wandering elsewhere. Thankfully after some sorely needed pauses and a few slugs of black coffee, I was able to sit through the remainder, all the while shaking my head. Oh I’ve seen worse in my time, far worse, but I still cannot recommend this for rental or purchase.
