If you have yet to see the New Zealand frontier masterpiece UTU, here’s your chance. Some excellent personage has provided a good-quality upload on Youtube:
It would be hard to overstate the importance of this movie for me. I wrote about it back in 2017:
When I was a mere stripling of 17, the year I graduated from high school, I saw a movie that absolutely blew me away. I haven’t written on it here before simply because it’s hard to come by now, and I hate stirring an interest in something readers can’t get. But I can’t just pass it by, because it helped to set my moccasins on my path.
UTU tells a tale from the bloody frontier wars of New Zealand in the 1860s. Didn’t know there were savage frontier wars in New Zealand in the 1860s? Neither did I back then. That movie opened my eyes to the reality that the frontier world that had grabbed me from my earliest days was not just a North American phenomenon, but an international one.
Set in New Zealand’s North Island during the New Zealand Wars, Utu follows Te Wheke, a Maori Captain in the British army. When Te Wheke’s unit comes across a village that has been slaughtered he, recognising it as his own, deserts the army and organises a guerilla force to terrorize the invading British forces. When the unit destroys the home of Williamson and kills his wife, Williamson vows to hunt down Te Wheke and kill him himself. Meanwhile, army scout Wiremu and recent South African frontier wars veteran Lieutenant Scott aim to track down Te Wheke themselves, also using guerrilla warfare techniques against the will of corrupt Colonel Elliot.
Paul McNamee says
I’ll need to put aside some time for that.
JimC says
You do. You’ll dig it.
Matthew says
Sounds interesting.
So much of frontier warfare seems tit-for-tat retaliation.
Not to long ago I read the third book in Laird Barron’s Isaiah Coleridge detective series: Worse Angels. Coleridge the main character is half-Maori and it gets somewhat into Maori mythology (and mythology in general.)
JimC says
The most horrific aspect of frontier violence is that retribution often fell on the innocent. When Logan’s family was massacred by border ruffians on the Ohio in 1774, he retaliated by attacking settlers who had nothing to do with the crime. White vigilantes frequently murdered peaceful Indians (Conestoga, Gnaddenhutten) in retaliation for militant actions.
This was more common than not, and it ramped up the cycle of violence tremendously, because so many people legitimately felt that they were attacked unjustly, for no reason at all.
Matthew says
That’s what I gather. I read Bob Paul’s biography, Boessenecker mentions one time in retaliation for an attack by the Apaches a militia massacred a bunch of Indians who not only weren’t involved with the attacks weren’t even Apache.
This may be why the Judeo-Christian tradition stresses that vengeance belongs to God. Unfortunately, even those raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition don’t always seem to get that.
Jerry N says
Williamson’s quad barrel shotgun and loaders was off the hook! Frontier ingenuity at its best!
David Wrolson says
I just ran across a trailer/review of a 1999 movie called Ravenous.
Sounds like it might fit some tastes here-weird Frontier movie with cannibals and stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeUrwVXGL-4
JimC says
One of our correspondents mentioned that in connection with a post on the Wendigo a few years back. I’m planning a Weird West/Frontier Horror binge/series for October, and this is in the queue.
Stephen Fox says
That’s pretty cool. Just watched it and time well spent. I’d never heard of it but then it came out three years before I was born.
J.C don’t miss a chance to watch Ravenous. You’ll love the soundtrack.