KEY POINTS:
Why do we keep making so many of them? It's a question to give you nightmares. Why are our horror movies so horrible? Well, not horrible, just wrong-headed, uninspired and misguided.
And why - via the taxpayer-funded backing of the NZ Film Commission - do we keep making so many of them?
The question occurred while watching The Ferryman, the fourth New Zealand horror to emerge in the past year. It comes after Black Sheep (which I liked for the zombie sheep laughs), Perfect Creature (which I sort of liked for its grand ideas) and The Tattooist (which only a mother of those involved could like. Though it did aim higher with an attempt to be a cross-cultural psychological thriller, even if it did have a gooey horror ending).
Despite the millions sunk into it, The Ferryman has gone straight to DVD here, its distributors thinking the marketing cost of a theatrical release wouldn't justify the likely box office returns. Despite having some smart young brains behind it (writer Nick Ward, director Chris Graham) and some experienced faces in front of it (John Rhys Davies, Kerry Fox, Julian Arahanga), it's pretty bloody awful. It too has a gooey ending. It might even be the same goo.
It's basically Dead Calm (it's set on a yacht only more crowded) meets one of those horror plots where the supernatural baddie passes from body to body - like Fallen or The Hidden - a set-up which requires way too much shouting screaming, snarling and bleeding from those involved.
Complete with a yacht named "Dionysus", it comes with allusions to the Greek mythology of the ferryman who would cart the dead to the afterlife across the river Styx, the same ferryman Chris De Burgh suggested shouldn't be paid in his hit song - the track gets a punk reprise at the end, capping off a movie which uses its Kiwi rock soundtrack very badly indeed.
How the elusive Greek ferryman ended up wandering the shipping lanes of the South Pacific and causing mayhem on passing craft isn't clear. But then most of the movie is set either in a becalming fog or a spray of blood.
It's got some amusingly appalling bits in it. But for all its high-seas hysterics, The Ferryman misses the boat, shouldn't be touched with a bargepole, gets lost at sea, sinks like a stone etc, etc.
Though my actual point is why does our NZFC-underwritten industry keep churning out horrors that aren't particularly scary, that fail to connect with a decent-sized audience at home or abroad, and whose stories and casting seem to groan under the weight of the international production deals behind them? Supposedly horror is easy and cheap and there will always be a market for them. Even if it is a DVD bargain bin a world away.
Sure, Black Sheep worked - and did well in Britain - because it was a splatter comedy rather than a horror. And Perfect Creature's failure was one of scale - its steampunk parallel universe of humans and vampires might have worked if it had been set somewhere other than Dunedin.
Of the directors and writers behind the aforementioned four films, really only Perfect Creature's Glen Standring would seem to have a genuine affinity for the genre.
Having proved their talents on music videos, short films or even other features (Graham did Sione's Wedding; Ward wrote Stickmen) these aspiring film-makers still have to start - or restart - somewhere.
After the latest attack of local fright-flicks with The Ferryman as the last gasp, it feels like NZ horror movies really are at a dead end.
