The Dead Lands serves up straight masculinity, so could not have done well in theaters. It is a story of the Maori, the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zeeland [think David Tua and Mark Hunt with war clubs] who practiced an extreme form of honor based ancestor worship. The Quequeeg character in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was based on such Polynesian warriors, who generally beat the piss out of belligerent Europeans in initial engagements.

The story begins with the brutal slaying of a fleeing warrior by an ugly giant, who consecrates the soul of his foe to the ancestors, and asks that they not curse him.

We are the introduced to a young man who seems ill-fitted for the type of warrior life demanded of his people. He is the son of a peace-minded chief, and the only man to escape the slaughter of his father’s tribe. His father had told him of the Dead Lands, the place where a tribe mysteriously died, which is hunted by a demon. He travels there to seek the aid of the demon.

In the mean time his antagonist, the son of the enemy chief who led the war band that slaughtered the tribe, and now carries the head of the boy’s father back to his tribe through the cursed lands, begins to develop along the lines of the civilized war leader who craves glory over tradition, which puts him at odds with himself; his thirst for glory clashing with his root value of honor.

It is of interest that the chief villain is the only person with modernist ambition. The tale hinges on another axis as well, the story of the accursed demon who haunts the Dead Lands. The belief in an ancestral consciousness awaiting the slain warrior is the key aspect of this tale, which, above all else, is a tale of the power of belief to the transcendent warrior mind.

Robert E. Howard would have loved this movie. If some of the ‘blood magic’ and ‘ancestral memory’ metaphors of this series are hard for the reader to grasp, I could suggest no better introduction to the concept than the Movie the Dead Lands, which happens to have some very well depicted ritualistic combats.

Note: the attention to detail is complete in this film, down to the warrior speaking to an enemy head, and the fact that the leaders of the raider tribe have their clavicle guards fastened with human finger bones.