Bedevil

Cultural schizophrenia is at the core of Bedevil, a trilogy of Australian ghost stories directed by Tracey Moffatt. Moffatt herself is half Aboriginal, half Irish-Australian, so she has a working knowledge of both sides of Australian society. She's based her film's three stories upon the tales she heard during her childhood in Queens­land, including one incident that actually happened to her mother.

On the surface, the three stories are fairly simple. In the first, a young Aboriginal boy is haunted by his experience with the ghost of an Ameri­can G.I. who died in a swamp. Moffatt plays her own mother in the second tale, which concerns an odd series of incidents around a railroad track where a blind girl was accidentally killed. In the final install­ment, a landlord has trouble learning that you just can't evict some people (or things) from a haunted build­ing.

Bedevil sounds a little like Tales From the Dark Down-under Side. In some ways, that's exactly what it is — a collection of spooky tales best told around a camp fire. But there's more to it than that.

Each tale contains a rigid sense of the unbreachable, yet invisible, walls that exist between white Australians and the Aborigi­nal population. Each story is placed within the context of the recent past and is filmed on abstract sets that resemble rank gardens painted by Salvador Dali. (Or think of Oklahoma as re staged by Stephen King.) The effect is often stunning, allowing Bedevil to achieve moments of surrealism that are deeply disturbing.

But each segment is also framed within a contemporary setting of curio shops, trashy back roads and over-built resorts. This is meant to remind us of the environmental and pop cultural damage done to the land by modern, white capitalism, but the effect is excessively heavy-handed and often mars the emotionally haunting quality of the sto­ries. That, combined with a truly dreadful musical soundtrack, causes Bedevil to peri­odically stumble into fits of "B" movie histrionics. Half of the film plays like a dream; the other half grates on viewers like a lousy TV ad.

But for the most part, Bedevil is worth seeing, because at its best, it's genuinely enchanting.