Death Curse of Tartu (1966)

An archaeology professor, his wife, and four students visit a forbidden native burial mound in the Florida everglades. There, the ghost of the witch doctor Tartu transforms into animals to kill them.

Let’s get this out of the way. This is a very amateur production. I cannot stress that enough. For context, it comes in just ahead of the almost unwatchable Manos: The Hands of Fate. But while I will not knock it for what it could not do, I will for what it should have been. And it should have been vaguely interesting. Want to build tension? Have the characters walk slowly through the tall grass. Excitement? Have them walk quickly through the tall grass. While the acting and dialog were poor, the film suffers because frequently the characters say nothing at all. There are plenty of spaces for robots to crack wise about the nonsensical story, which was sorely missing. This is a dull movie, a fault I cannot abide.

So, let’s get on with goofing on the film, shall we? The four students (conveniently, two couples) decide to “roast some marshmallows” away from professor square and his wife. Instantly, the two women are in bikinis and making out with their fully clothed partners. Then the women do that one dance that all young people in the 1960’s know, until Tartu, in the form of a shark, eats some of them. The remaining woman screams and is instantly back into her normal attire.

There are many examples of low budgets and poor storytelling, like when the characters hide behind Tartu’s plainly visible sarcophagus before finally seeing it. Also, night scenes are normally shot “day for night”, where they film in daylight then tint to add a nighttime illusion. This effect is frequently unconvincing in low budget films, but here they forgot the tinting step. You wouldn’t know it was night had the actors not said so. It’s telling when you learn that filming was completed within a single week and the script was written in an afternoon, and your reaction is, what took them so long?

Writer/director William Grefe would go on to make some pretty average films and even did work on Live and Let Die. Death Curse of Tartu was never going to be a good film, but there were lost opportunities to make it interesting, or at least make sense. And it should have been twenty minutes shorter. AMRU 2.