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ZEALAND (NEW)
"I've got a urinary infection!"
You might be forgiven for thinking the New Zealand film industry begins and ends with one particular rotund, bearded Tolkein fan, with possibly a side-order of pretentious period melodrama centred round a beach-bound keyboard instrument. But, though it's given rise to far fewer features than Australia, NZ has given rise to a large slice of defiantly oddball cinema. Like Oz, it was represented in British and American films well before it started producing significant work of its own. For instance, Lana Turner and Van Heflin fled to the land of the long white cloud in 1946 melodrama GREEN DOLPHIN STREET, and Jack Hawkins colonised it in rugged 19th century colonial epic THE SEEKERS - with a little help from a rather un-rugged Kenneth Williams, no less.
Actual indigenous filmmaking suffered mightily from the lack of either distributor or studio. Nonetheless, early pioneers included Rudall Hayward, Colin McKenzie and John O'Shea, who managed to get features off the ground and into cinemas, even if, for the most part, their means were decidedly rudimentary (up until the late '60s, they were still shooting with non-synched sound cameras, necessitating a laboriously lenghthy sound dubbing session later on). O'Shea's interracial Maori romance story BROKEN BARRIER of 1952 made local impact, but we'll start our meander through the Kiwi kinoscope with 1965's RUNAWAY, a veritable new-wavey story of an angsty teenage boy escaping the repression of small-town NZ by, well, running away, meeting various characters and passing the obligatory majestic New Zealand scenery on the way. Then came DON'T LET IT GET YOU, New Zealand's answer to A HARD DAY'S NIGHT, in which a displaced Aussie drummer seeks fame and fortune in Rotorua. Kiri te Kanawa and Maori pop star Howard Morrison both featured heavily.
But New Zealand cinema really begins, for us at least, with Aussie emigre Roger Donaldson, and his 1977 near-future actioner SLEEPING DOGS. It's a familiar enough conceit - the islands are overtaken by a totalitarian regime, various renegade armies are formed to fight back using any means necessary, an innocent bystander (Sam Neill, in this case) gets mixed up in their insurgence while trying to avoid contributing to the bloodshed - but it's shot in a heady style and the novelty of the locale got it an international release, and indeed became the first NZ film to screen in the US. Following on from that, Donaldson helped found the New Zealand Film Commission the following year, a funding and distribution organisation along similar lines to Australia's.
The first film he made under these new auspices was the kids' musical adventure comedy NUTCASE, in which a bunch of comic book villains (led by one Evil Eva) hold Auckland to ransom by threatening detonate a nuclear bomb in the crater of a local dormant volcano, only to be foiled by - yes! - a group of three meddling kids and their home-made anti-gravity machine. He then swung back to harsh drama with SMASH PALACE, in which a middle-aged car-obsessed father (played by cult NZ star, the ex-Brightonian jazz drummer Bruno Lawrence, of whom more anon) responds to his collapsing marriage by kidnapping his daughter and making for those photogenically remote landscapes. A classic piece of work, Smash palace helped put NZ cinema firmly on the map and launched Donaldson into international league. After helming THE BOUNTY, a lavish telling of the Mutiny chestnut with Mel Gibson as Mr. Christian and Anthony Hopkins as Capt. Bligh, came the likes of Cocktail, Species and, er, Cadillac Man.
Then there was documentary maker Geoff Steven, who hit paydirt with the excellent SKIN DEEP, a fictional study of a none-more-isolated small NZ township which, under the auspices of its dictatorial burgermeister, decides to 'put itself on the map' by raising funds for a massive publicity campaign, at the centre of which is the hiring of a big citty masseuse to work in the local health spa. This last appointment really puts the cat among the pigeons, as several previously tightly repressed male townsfolk start to unwind at speed over the streetwise new arrival. This is all set against a keenly- observed background of '70s mundane small-town life, instantly recogniseable to anyone from the UK (the giant thermometer showing money raised, the various parochial community events, etc.) but with many odd, typically kiwi quirks (a log-chopping contest). Steven returned to documentaries after that, apart from the decidedly odd STRATA, a lumbering tale of a group of travellers who are put in quarantine after a plane journey, but break out into the south island wilderness, eventually meeting vulcanologist Nigel Davenport and his team, leading to... well, two hours of hand-held longeurs, basically. A very odd film, and not necessarily in a good sense.
Geoff Murphy started out the way most NZ directors did, self-funding his own spare-time productions on 16mm. Early efforts included the enticingly-entitled TANKBUSTERS and UENUKU, the first Maori-language film, followed by WILD MAN starring Bruno Lawrence as one of a pair of conmen finding rich pickings in late 19th century gold mining communities, and DAGG DAY AFTERNOON, a zany vehicle for wellington boot-wearing kiwi comic Fred 'That'll be the door' Dagg. Then came a real popular success - GOODBYE PORK PIE sees a jilted husband hook up with a local nutball to drive from top to bottom of the country in a yellow mini to try and win her back, getting into many high- speed run-ins with the law and other New Zealanders along the way.
Murphy's follow up to ...Pork Pie was even more off-the-wall, and it's our favourite kiwi film of the lot. UTU is, in essence, a western formula, with Maori rebels led by Te Weke (an acting debut for former trade union leader Anzac Wallace), an ex-army corporal who swaps sides to exact revenge on the colonial government who have reneged on their land agreements and attacked villages. It's chock full of action and gun battle scenes, shot in a fast-paced, wide- angle style for which the term 'bravura' could have been invented. But there's more to it than straightforward white/black hat fare, as distrust ambiguous motives are felt and held by nearly all the characters. It's a heartfelt and serious tale, but black humour seeps through it, as does a hefty dose of violent slapstick - one memorable running gag sees settler Bruno Lawrence, descending into paranoid obsession after Te Weke kills his wife, trying to invent a Maori-stopping supergun by strapping first two, then four, then eight rifles together, with disastrous recoil results.
Murphy's next film couldn't have been more of a change of pace. THE QUIET EARTH sees Lawrence, again, as a worker on a nebulously- defined 'government scientific project', which goes wrong and wipes out every living thing on Earth, except for (it seems) Lawrence. For the first half of the film, Lawrence wanders the deserted country, looting shops, pissing about with trains, berating cardboard cut- outs of historical figures, and slowly descending from anarchic delight into lonely depression. Then he discovers another, female, survivor, and the inevitable romance starts to develop, only to be stymied when a third, a massively-build Maori, turns up. The film then becomes a three-way emotional stand-off, before further scientific 'events' lead to an ambiguous, if not downright weird, ending. Then, after co-writing the screenplay for sub-Christine possessed car chiller MR WRONG, it was right back to Murphy's chase scene roots with NEVER SAY DIE, in which an investigative reporter uncovers a MacGuffin of a state secret that leads to his frantic pursuit all over New Zealand's south island, with more explosions than ever before. Then American studios came calling, but Murphy's sojourn to Hollywood met with limited success - Young Guns II and Freejack, anybody? He returned home when Peter Jackson picked him as second unit director for the LOTR trilogy.
Elsewhere, as in Australia (see O for OZ), shortform whimsy was the order of the day, with brilliant titles like THE MAD DOG GANG SPOOKS WILLIE WINK WINK AND THE WOOBLER and THE AMAZING STORY OF HOW THE CORNER GROCERY BECAME THE A.O.K. EVEN FASTER FAST FAST FUTUREMART, in which a crackpot inventor in a provincial town invents the supermarket trolley, with chaotic results for the community, providing the feldgling Channel Four with welcome wry filler material of a Wednesday evening. In fact early Roger Donaldson effort DEREK, the story of a nerdy office worker who lives a sexually frustrated fantasy life, gets the sack, and then glues his desk drawers shut with a fish sandwich in them, never seemed to be off the station at one point.
While not as remote as Australia, the NZ landscape and the isolated world of the farming homestead inevitably threw up the odd romantic parable, such as Vincent Ward's 1984 curio VIGIL, in which a tomboyish, farm-dwelling teenage girl's hermetic, fantasy-fuelled worldview is rocked when her father dies among the sheep, and a poacher simultaneously turns up and starts wooing her grieving mum, egged on by Bill 'Hancock' Kerr's nutty, perma-pyjama-ed Gramps. Ward would go on to almost direct Alien3, before David Fincher was brought in at the last minute. In Peter Sharp's TRESPASSES of the same year, it's the young girl who runs away from the rural community, to the approbation of her puritanical dad, Patrick MacGoohan. The small town is terrorised by a murderous, yet charismatic, stranger in THE SCARECROW, usually recognised as New Zealand's first indigenous horror film, with veteran actor John Carradine playing the titular menace. Meanwhile BATTLETRUCK was the obligatory kiwi answer to Mad Max - a post- apocalyptic mish-mash of bike stunts, body kit-festooned juggernauts, huge pyrotechnic displays and John 'Cliffy' Ratzenberger.
It wasn't all small-town conservatism, though. Set against an entirely urban backdrop, ANGEL MINE was an art-school/punk mockumentary from then-student Davd Blyth, trailing a dysfunctional couple through a series of breakdowns, often accompanied by a second, identical pair in heavy bondage gear. It's every bit as '70s as it sounds, with a soundtrack by NZ punk band The Suburban Reptiles, and possibly its greatest achievement was leading the local censors to give it the warning label "contains punk material". It took seven years for Blyth to come up with his next feature, the bizarre no-budget zombie splatterfest DEATH WARMED UP, wherein a mad scientist hypnotises a young man to shoot his parents, and on his release, the kid goes after the old man in his zombie-ridden island laboratory. With plenty of flying gore played for shock/comic effect (including our old friend Bruno Lawrence as a hunchbacked zombie whose head explodes), it plays like a slightly more warped version of a Peter Jackson film, except Death Warmed Up appeared nearly two years before Jackson appeared on the scene.
Which brings us back to where we started. Jackson's debut feature (as a schoolboy he'd entered the local equivalent of the Screen Test Young Filmmaker of the Year contest with the Super 8 Harryhausen tribute short THE VALLEY), BAD TASTE, a plotless piss-taking exercise in physical disgust filmed over a four-year-plus period on spare weekends with his mates in rubber masks and blue shirts, has secured its place in indie film legend. As we've seen, he was far from the first to go down this route, but the sheer complexity and scale of his subsequent productions dwarfed anything that had taken place in the islands before. Muppet sleazeathon MEET THE FEEBLES was as huge in scope as any episode of the original Muppet Show, while the $3 million wonder that is BRAINDEAD knocks itself out with every gag and effect it can think of, as if Jackson was trying to encapsulate a compendium of horror effects in one film. Despite the subject matter, it was pretty obvious someone that dedicated to their craft would end up at the top of cinema's food chain one way or another.
Jackson remains true to his New Zealand roots, though - shortly before embarking on the Tolkein trail, he made FORGOTTEN SILVER, a reverential documentary on local pioneer Colin McKenzie, a true technical innovator who, around 1908, independently of the rest of the world, invented the first mechanical movie camera, made the first sound feature, as well as the first colour film. It caused a major stir - especially when McKenzie's existence was revealed as a tissue of Zelig-style pork pies on Jackson's part. Still, the reality of pre-1990s kiwi filmmaking is stuffed with innovation and wit in its own right. Here's hoping Jacko's, and by extension NZ's, well-earned success doesn't snuff out the reckless amateur spirit that made all those old films unique.
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