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Thanks to their totally incompetent skipper (Manuel Fihman), four
friends - Anna (Kitty Cole), Tom (Kris Eivers), Sandy (Suzi
Lorraine) and Chester (Theodore Bouloukos) - land on a deserted island
instead of the holiday resort they were planning to go to ... but they
decide to make the best of it, after all, they're well equipped with beer
and cocaine, the beach is beautiful, so what have they got to lose? Plenty
it seems, as on the first day, Sandy and Chester, while innocently tanning
on the beach, are killed by natives, and only the fact that Anna and Tom
were taking a walk has saved them, actually. They soon come to the
realization they are not safe and hide in one of the caves, and Tom
promises to save the both of them by building a raft - but his coke and
alcohol addiction coupled with his incompetence regarding raft-building
make this promise a little unkeepable ... and then he's killed by native
Kohir (Noshir Dalal), who then goes after Anna, too, but falls in love
upon seeing her. Now he knows he has to sacrifice her according to the law
of his tribe - but he just can't and thus decides to hide her away in a
hut away from the village, secretly taking care of her and even defending
her from fellow tribesmen. Of course, at first Anna is scared stiff, but
after a while (and oblivious to the fact that Kohir killed Tom), the
starts to trust him ... and eventually the two become lovers and he
impregnates her. When Anna is about 6 months pregnant, Kohir decides to
take her to his village after all, and totally clashes with the shaman and
even his father the chieftain. Anna in the meantime is shocked to find out
Kohir's tribe are cannibals, and there are skulls and bones littered all
over the village, along with relics from castaways, including her friends,
and she is shocked to finally learn Kohir actually did kill Tom, but
trusts him too much to break up with him - and needs him as well in this
unfriendly enviroment. Then the old chieftain dies, and since Kohir is his
undisputed successor, that improves Anna's chances of survival ... but the
shaman already has a plan to trap and kill Anna. And then the zombies
(including zombified versions of Anna's friends) attack, and Kohir
heroically throws himself into their way to buy Anna enough time to leave
the island by canoe, but after he kills quite a few of them, he returns as
a zombie to go after her ... Destined to be Ingested is
an narratively not always consequential but nevertheless rather
interesting film: What doesn't work are the attempts at irony at the
beginning of the movie, something that's completely abandoned later on,
giving the film something of a schizophrenic feel, and Tom actually gets
too much of a backstory that does too little for the film as a whole. What
does work is the portrayal of the (fictional) native tribe that combines a
crude and brutal mythology with remnants of our civilisation washed ashore
over the centuries, and it's fortunately never explained in full, letting
it develop a life of its own in the audience's imagination instead. Also,
the film's much more realistic play on the Tarzan-story
works quite in favour of the film, and the whole thing's carried by a
handful of pretty good performances and a fittingly subtle directorial
effort, making the most of its settings. As for the zombies at the end
of the movie, I really don't know - on one hand they work brilliantly as
to present a new threat to the proceedings at large - but on the other,
whether they make narrative sense and are not just pulled out of the hat
to end this story with a bang is questionable at best. Still, totally
worth a look at least.
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