Short Cuts – Guilty Pleasures: Tiki (2006)

During a standard shift at the local funny farm, Dr. Widesworth consults with Dr. Godwin about a girl, named Julie. She’s been diagnosed as a “cutter”, a self-mutilator. Convinced she can add some insight, Widesworth wants Godwin’s help. Meeting with the decidedly sane psychotic, the docs become privy to Julie’s bizarre, unreal story. Seems she once did the old University thang with a group of her best friends. One day, a new girl from Hawaii showed up. Her name was Amy and she was introverted and inhibited. Naturally, Julie’s catty clique instantly classified her as a ‘loser’. When it becomes obvious that the withdrawn islander had eyes for drama teacher Mark Bernardi, the crew determines to play a joke on the Pacific princess. Unfortunately, it resulted in Amy going comatose. When Julie’s Aunt Maylea arrived to care for her, she brought along an ancient Polynesia cure. She then used an enchanted Tiki doll to avenge Amy. She believed that, only through the systematic killing of everyone involved, could her niece’s soul be saved – apparently. And thus the massacre began…

Lord Almighty, but you have to adore Tiki! Oh sure, it’s a schlock revisit to the Charles Band school of scares, with just a splash of Dan Curtis’s Trilogy of Terror thrown in for gory good measure. Writer/director Ron Ford obviously suckled on the Zuni Fetish Doll’s Movie of the Week teat for several years, resulting in this Polynesian prank that’s more marvelously tacky than a blistering bowl of rotten poi. All the characters are jerks, barely able to provoke our curiosity, and the plot is so staggeringly mechanical that we keep waiting for the creepy old guy to turn up and tell the rest of the prospective victim’s pool that they are, indeed, “all doomed!” But thanks to a perfectly satisfactory puppet assassin, as well as the unrestrained bliss of seeing said plaything track and take out a cluster of clods, this incontrovertibly non-scary homage to horror’s blatant b-movie ideals is spectacularly silly. You’ll cackle at all the logic leaps and piss-poor intrigues, while at the same time championing a little island icon with a voracious craving for bad actor body parts.

It goes without saying that our star, an ersatz actress named Jolene Smith, is extremely unappealing. Even when she’s gussied as Eliza Doolittle in preparation for her part in Pygmalion (emphasis on the first syllable, please), those shrieks you hear aren’t paranormal beings yelping at the moon. It’s viewers around the world wondering how this attractiveness-addled performer ever got a callback. While it may appear unjust to highlight such an observable visual aspect of the film, it definitely supports the homespun spirit that helps make Tiki what it is. In the hands of some veteran specialists and teeming with onscreen CGI-sores, we’d be groaning at all the dumb dialogue, retard line readings and obvious continuity errors. But by hook or by crook, our title terror makes it all tolerable. Perhaps it’s the retro recollection of Karen Black taking on that vicious little blade wielder with a yap full of fangs, or the current island-oriented model who darts across the screen, little wooden feet tapping away in full sonic mode. Whatever the reason, Ford has found a way to make the monster movie fun again. And he does it by concentrating almost exclusively on the villian.

Indeed, without our new shock symbol, Tiki would flop quicker than a family-oriented Robin Williams comedy. The little wooden wonder is the gratuitous glue that holds this otherwise middling fright flick together. The nudity is nauseating (especially a Disgusting Girls Gone Wild style lesbian sequence – ew!) and the bloodletting is awesome, but limited to just a few memorable moments. Some of the set-ups are completely uproarious (one corpulent boytoy and his equally balloonish-babe make bile-producing whoopee in a hayloft before Tiki performs his serial public service = GO! TIKI! GO!) and the climax lays the groundwork for a possible sequel, which means more of our featured fright figurine. While one lone element doesn’t usually rescue a failing genre effort, the title treat in Tiki has enough cinematic charisma to save several subpar scare films. Ron Ford deserves plenty of fright fan Frenchings for delivering on what could have been a major macabre calamity. If you want a wonderful reminder to the diabolical doll era of terror, this talented little island idol will definitely deliver the terrific Trader Vic’s goodness.