Pick of the week: V48 Hours Grand Final

It's the show in which the answers to that age-old question - "get up to anything interesting in the weekend?" - come with so much strange evidence.

New comedy show Radiradirah will be hard pressed to come up with stuff quite as mad - or as funny - as many of the entries screening during the 90-minute grand final of the annual V48HOURS contest.

Tonight's the night for the best among the hundreds of teams from around the country who dedicated a weekend last month to making a short film from scratch - the teams go into the shoot with their film's genre drawn out of a hat, along with various compulsory elements to meet.

Screening tonight will be the seven city final winners, plus four wild cards chosen by Sir Peter Jackson from those entries which didn't win their local derby.

The contest will be handing out acting and technical awards as well as best use of this year's mandatory line ("When you look at it that way"), best use of the mandatory prop (a broken toy) and the coveted "best worst film" which given some of the contest's many epic fails, should be something to see.

Of the good ones though - TimeOut has seen ten of the eleven finalists, with one last wild card to be announced tonight - it would seem the possible winner might be from the contest's three Auckland finalists up against a Wellington gem of a romantic comedy.

Of the possible contenders, past winners The Downlow Concept's Only Son is a ghost movie which asks the question: "What if your late father followed you around and gave you dating advice in a strangely offensive manner?"

Fellow Queen City team IdiotVision's Confessions of a Fabricator reinvents the romantic-comedy in a boy-meets-sock-puppet kind of way. It comes complete with purloined line from Notting Hill, a movie it resembles in no other way, unless there were deleted scenes involving Hugh Grant and random hosiery.

We can also recommend the third Auckland finalist, nifty mistaken-identity heist film The Pool, and not just because it has a character who says: "I write for the Herald."

The capital city flick is Balls and Chain, one of two stag party-themed finalists - the other being the dubious Dunedin winner The Stag Do - which makes charming use of a naked leading man, a girl on a bicycle and a long and winding road to create a sweetly funny rom-com.

The rest have some inspired touches and Christchurch finalist Gorilla Team Gorilla deserves admiration for their obvious determination to make a western, despite their allotted genre being "sexual education".

* For more info and to watch the finalists see v48hours.co.nz.

LOWDOWN

Where: C4
When: 9.30pm tonight
What: DIY flick madness