TERROR LOSTRALIS
Australia, 1976, 55 minutes, Colour.
Directed by David Shepherd.
Terror Lostralis is a short feature made with the assistance of the Creative Branch of the Australian Film Commission. While it is experimental in tone and has the touch of the amateur, it is nevertheless quite enjoyable in succeeding in what it set out to do: a parody of disaster films and the popular kind of story from Conan Doyle's The Lost World or the stories from Edgar Rice Burroughs.
The film is made in colour, is quite well photographed and paced. The acting is better than average in this kind of parody. The types from the films of the '20s and '30s and '40s are here. The techniques of the serial are used - intelligently and with tongue in cheek. Some of the humour has the touch of bathos; however, on the whole the film succeeds. It is the material of skit and of television parody. However, audiences can enjoy this film because of its obvious enjoyment of the originals as well as seeing the funny side of them. There is a plane disaster, the introduction to a strange group of crew and tourists.
The setting is Australia. The crash landing is done with a parody on disaster films - and there is a dispute about leadership. As the group progresses, a snob lady (with allusions to Dame Zara Bate, as well as her advertising of Maxwell House coffee) dies with dreadful fish devouring her. The rest of the group moves on, searching for the Golden Koala in a hidden valley. The joke of the leadership is that the captain is called Kirk Rogers (echoes of Star Trek and Buck Rogers). There is a journalist heroine (who can even write copy while she is tied up); there is an academic professor, an assistant, a wealthy businessman who turns out to be the villain, a mysterious Women's Lib Cuban-looking revolutionary - who turns out to resemble the goddess from the past. There is an encounter with a mysterious tribe, a mass massacre done in send-up tradition and the discovery of the valley. The villain steals the Golden Koala.
The ending is obvious but amusing enough. An interesting idea - with possibilities of development (in the vein of the most successful American parody of disaster films, Flying High). Members of the same group were responsible for acting in, scripting, the technical side and direction of a half-hour short called Buckeye and Pinto. It takes the western conventions and cliches and deadpans them. The parody is making Australia like America. There are cattle sales, mateship (with overtones of the gun symbolising masculinity, the mateship of the cowboys etc.), there is a villain and a sturdy heroine and a mass shoot-out at the end. When the programme was released, some black and white photography of the film's premiere at the Valhalla in Richmond, Melbourne, was incorporated into a 1930's Cinesound Review. Mock spoken commercials were also shown at interval. An indication of the style of experimental film - with possibilities for commercial success.
