KEY POINTS:
I don't know whether the road to DVD hell is paved with good intentions or not, but it is certainly a long and arduous one.
It was in the winter of 2006 that Kerry Fox was back from London and appearing on TV One's Book Show telling us fellow panellists about the fun she was having holed up on a yacht and being drenched in blood for the horror movie she was in Auckland to make, The Ferryman.
On Friday, a DVD of that movie arrived without fanfare in the post. On Saturday morning, I read in my newspaper about the $4 million of New Zealand Film Commission and Film Fund money that had been poured into the film - and how it had failed to secure a cinema release, being pushed back from last June to last October to never, with no Kiwi distributor putting up its hand to show it. On Saturday night - at 11.30pm, an hour suited for such things - I sat down to watch The Ferryman.
Oh dear.
The film's tagline is: "Everyone must pay." Everyone, it seems, includes the viewer.
On paper, The Ferryman might have looked a winning proposition - though that paper can't have included the script.
One of the film's less likely lines involves a character complaining: "I smell like bird."
This whole film smells like bird.
It was written by Nick Ward, of Stickmen fame, and directed by Chris Graham, who made Sione's Wedding.
Fox was on board (from Shallow Grave to a watery one), as was John Rhys-Davies, from The Lord of the Rings.
Rhys-Davies plays a Greek sailor who has been cheating death for centuries, stealing the bodies of his victims when he stabs them with a supernatural blade. He is picked up from his drifting boat by a fog-bound charter yacht of attractive young tourists helmed by British actor Tamer Hassan and Fox as his Aussie girlfriend.
A slasher movie, full of blood and guts, and sex and swearing, is not to everyone's tastes, but the best of them have their own in-built integrity and ingenuity, and considerable commercial appeal - an important factor for Film Fund backing (which is reported to have been to the tune of $3 million in this case).
Unfortunately, the worst of the genre is cliched and calculating, with no appeal at all, commercial or otherwise.
There are scenes and moments of direction and dialogue in The Ferryman so cheesy you wonder whether it is knowingly bad. Half-arsed lines are delivered half-heartedly. When a victim is stabbed and their body is possessed by the evil spirit, the wobbling of the two actors involved could lead you to think you were watching a Comic Strip send-up. On the DVD cover, Aint' It Cool News calls the film "completely old school" and it has also been labelled "1970s-style" - descriptions that cover a multitude of sins. Is The Ferryman being postmodern? It doesn't seem to have a clue what it's being? It is as fog-bound as the yacht.
Certainly, the film's commercial aspirations can't have extended to the United States, given its cardboard cut-out American couple - stupid and self-centred, condescended to by the New Zealanders on board, and by implication by the film and its audience. Australians, too, might have wondered at Fox's broad-brush blowsiness.
In his blog about the film on The Ferryman website, Ward admits his background is in comedy: "In my own mind I would think of myself as a strange choice to write a horror movie. My shelves don't groan with DVDs of blood and dismemberment - a quick glance reveals Sideways, Field of Dreams, DIG, The Big Lebowski, Batman Begins and (honesty sucks) Finding Nemo. But I suspect somewhere deep inside our psyche comedy and horror are intrinsically linked."
However, he goes on to say he is true to the spirit of horror, and sought "to find and locate the dark, dank place where fear dwelled like a coiled spring".
He insists you can't write a horror film with an eye to a quick buck, only with "the intention of writing an intelligent horror movie that offers something new".
There are hints, though, that the making of the film might have at times been a "dark, dank place" itself.
"I will be the first to admit that the process of writing The Ferryman has been a horror story in its own right and there have also been times when it has been a complete farce. Comedy and horror. But those of you who have been there know that making a New Zealand movie will always come with these conditions so I'm not interested in taking you on that ride.
"For those of you who have yet to embark completely on that ride, two pieces of advice - one, develop a thick skin and two, what doesn't kill a project only makes it stronger.
"Yeah, right."
These last sentiments would probably be shared by director Garth Maxwell (Jack Be Nimble, When Love Comes), whose big screen inactivity in recent years was lamented in a Listener interview with Bruce Babington , author of A History of the New Zealand Fiction Feature Film.
Maxwell could be forgiven, though, if he weren't especially sympathetic toward Ward's particular plight.
In a letter to the Listener, he explained that his big screen inactivity was a consequence of the behind-the-scenes activity - not to say travails - he'd endured in his quest for Film Commission assistance and such "paltry" sums as $5000 to make proposed films of Joy Cowley's Hunter, Annamarie Jagose's Slow Water and Vincent O'Sullivan's Believers to the Bright Coast.
The letter prompted a reply from Film Commission chief executive Ruth Harley in which she pointed out that the commission was still talking to Maxwell about the Hunter project and funding remained a possibility.
"New Zealand has many talented film-makers," Harley wrote, "all of whom must compete on an increasingly overpopulated global stage. The Film Commission's value to the industry is greatly enhanced if the assistance we offer in developing films takes account of the reality of that international marketplace. New Zealand cinema has often managed to punch above its weight and we look forward to helping our film-makers continue this tradition into the future."
The Film Commission's contribution to The Ferryman is reported to have been more than $900,000.
What weight exactly was this film ever going to punch at?
(This posting was written to the following soundtrack: Once: Music from the Motion Picture - why do I find this so embarrassing? - and The Veils' Nux Vomica.)
