New Zealand’s Films in 2015 Were Blood-Splattered and Hobbit-Free

By the time the final Hobbit film clawed its way onto screens last December, it had become clear that 2014 was a very, very good year for New Zealand film. And not only because Peter Jackson was finally exiled to the Phantom Zone by Tolkien's enraged estate. Taika Waititi collaborated with half of Flight of the Conchords to release the excellent What We Do in the Shadows. The Dark Horse put Cliff Curtis's talents to work in one of the most affecting portrayals of working-class New Zealand since Once Were Warriors. And The Dead Lands came out of nowhere to be a gloriously gory imagining of pre-contact Maori society set against a primeval New Zealand forestscape.

As well as being thoroughly decent (Hobbit obviously excluded), 2014's haul also performed as self-aware tourism bait. Since then it's become cliché to remind people that "the landscape" is often the biggest character in local films. For the most part, this year's crop takes all that and trashes it: no buzzy bees, no wide-angle shots of dense bush, no coming of age stories featuring relatable Maori protagonists.

One of the more strikingly original films of the year has to be Turbo Kid (a Canadian co-production). Set in the post-apocalyptic future of 1997, it's a genre pastiche played completely straight: there's no ironic winking toward the camera. The film follows the eponymous "Kid" as he struggles to rescue his girlfriend from a local warlord. It's a colorful (mainly blood-colored) tribute to 80s action flicks, with an aesthetic somewhere between the self-serious cheese of Commando and the absurd carnage of the first Robocop. It even distorts and skips in several places, like an ancient VHS that's been watched too often. Stellar performances, especially from love interest Laurence Leboeuf, propel a solid script and neat special effects for a consistently entertaining 1.5 hours. If it hadn't been for the NZ Film Commission logo at the start, I wouldn't have known it had anything to do with Aotearoa.

Closer to home, Deathgasm makes no apologies for being aimed squarely at a very specific Venn diagram overlap: splatter fans who are also giant metalheads. Set in generic small-town New Zealand (though it could be anywhere in the Anglosphere), Deathgasm opens with Brodie, sent to live with religious relatives after his meth-dependent mom was caught blowing a shopping mall Santa. The first half sets up trouble at school, his pining for sexy Miranda, and his devotion to metal. But when his garage band accidentally plays a satanic verse, the god-fearing townsfolk are turned into monstrous zombies, and the second half picks up speed.

Seasoned on big-budget productions like The Avengers, and—yes—The Hobbit, director Jason Lei Howden's mission is straightforward: cram as many heavy metal tunes and as much fake blood as possible into 86 minutes. It's dumb and fun and somehow sweet, in the best traditions of Kiwi splatter—think Braindead. Again though, Deathgasm could have been set anywhere, you have to search for references that tie it to a particular location, local accents aside. The same can't be said of the two best documentaries to hit screens this season.

The Ground We Won is filmed in black and white, and explores the central place of rugby in the cultural canon of a small town in the rural North Island. 25 April is an animated reconstruction of the war diaries kept by six New Zealanders fighting at Gallipoli. Both are powerful films in their own right, and it's a pity they've disappeared into the lightless vacuum of the festival circuit without being shown more widely. It's a fate that less specifically Kiwi films, including Deathgasm and Turbo Kid, have eluded.

More relevantly than any box office, these films were vindicated by seeders on torrent sites and illegally downloaded in astonishing numbers. There's something simultaneously edifying and gut-bustingly frustrating about watching a bunch of foreigners download your nation's most significant contribution to international intellectual property.

To my mind, this change of focus in New Zealand feature film is a good thing. Or if not a good thing, at least symptomatic of Kiwi film's increasing confidence in being able to succeed on its own merit as objectively good entertainment. As Andrew Beattie, one of Deathgasm's producers reflected, changes like Netflix and a more liberal funding regime mean young New Zealand creatives no longer think they have to "write the disabled solo mom smoking crack in South Auckland" in order to break even.

If Kiwi films in 2014 succeeded because they told stories big enough that anyone could get something out of them, then 2015's more modest batch work because they know they'll find an appreciative audience outside of arthouses and film festivals. They no longer need to represent "us" on the silver screen, they just need to be good. And, mostly, they are.

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