Dan Slevin previews three titles from Aotearoa’s number one festival celebrating genre films.
Photo: Trans World Entertainment
In these uncertain times for cinemas, the one consistent ray of light is the public’s support for genre movies. Horror films, especially, have sustained their audiences and not a week has gone by since I started my newsletter that I haven’t seen a new horror film in cinemas.
Horror fans are loyal, love to see films in cinemas and experience them with audiences. And while they love a good franchise as much as anyone, they’re also much more open to novelty. They like that it’s a broad church.
This provides great opportunities for young filmmakers. Budgets are manageable and old fashioned film-making chops are rewarded over star driven packages and huge marketing budgets.
These films also tend to have a long life in home entertainment. We even have a streaming service dedicated to horror – Shudder via AMC+.
Science-fiction has a similar profile and cerebral, low budget, high concept, science-fiction can often be surprisingly inexpensive to produce.
The Terror-Fi Film Festival has been celebrating these pictures for a few years now and has really hit its straps as a festival that will provide an advance showcase for films that are going to get a wide release and a big screen opportunity for those that are not.
This year’s festival has settled on a programme of 14 features (plus one late edition special preview) and I got to check out three of them before the festival started today.
Maggie Moore(s)
Photo: Madman
A film in the comedy thriller genre rather than horror or science-fiction, Maggie Moore(s) might have come from pulp crime novelists like Elmore Leonard or directors like early Coens or John Dahl. And it’s set in the now familiar arid landscape of Western New Mexico, home of Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul and Dark Winds.
The film reunites Mad Men stars John Slattery and Jon Hamm with Slattery behind the camera for only his second feature. Hamm plays a recently widowed local police chief who has joined a creative writing course to try and heal his loss.
The relatively sleepy town is rocked by two brutal murders, both of women named Maggie Moore and the only connection between them are their names.
Hamm and his deputy, played in a shrewd piece of casting by Ted Lasso’s Nick Mohammed, find themselves getting involved in some of the town’s many seedy secrets as they search for a culprit. Hamm also finds himself getting involved with a witness (played nicely by Tina Fey).
The best performance in the whole thing is by Micah Stock as one of the widowed Moores, a desperate sandwich shop franchisee who becomes increasingly unhinged as the film goes on.
The Artifice Girl
Photo: Terror-Fi
While the strength of Maggie Moore(s) is really in the strong cast supporting a good script, The Artifice Girl is a great idea in search of a stronger ensemble to play with it.
Florida auteur Franklin Ritch is something of a prodigy – writing, directing, editing and acting in well-regarded shorts and now a calling card feature.
Ritch plays a software developer who has invented a technology called Cherry that can accurately mimic the behaviour of a young girl in order to go online and trap pedophile predators. The authorities persuade him to share control of the project in exchange for help developing the artificial intelligence behind the system.
Over time, the question of who or what Cherry actually is comes to dominate, and the film does a generally excellent job of articulating the debates about AI despite getting too shouty too often.
I’m not an AI expert, by any means, but Ritch’s script seems to hit all the right notes and use scarily accurate technical vernacular. It’s a better, deeper, examination of AI, what it is and what it might become, than films like The Creator that use the idea as a simple platform for special effects. It has to because The Artifice Girl doesn’t have any.
The arrival in Act 3 of the great actor Lance Henriksen takes the film into nicely challenging territory but also reminds us that the rest of the cast are not really on his level.
Henriksen might be best known as the android Bishop in Aliens (and spinoffs) and it’s nice to see him as a very human person having to debate a lucid young android here.
Killer Klowns from Outer Space
Photo: Trans World Entertainment
Celebrating whakapapa is another factor in the success of Terror-Fi and this year they have screenings of the original Stargate from 1994 and one of the most bizarre cult horror of all time, Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
The film is the only non-technical credit for special effects, puppetry, stop-motion and prop-making wizards, the Chiodo brothers who wrote and directed it in 1988, largely as a vehicle for their latex mask and puppet making.
A small California town is terrorised by aliens who look like bizarre and repulsive clowns and their spaceship resembles a circus big top. This provides plenty of fodder for circus and carnie cliché’s to be turned into gnarly but not terribly gory deaths.
The sheer ridiculousness of the premise – at one point someone speculates that these creatures had visited earth earlier and inspired our own clown culture but sensibly that's not pursued – combined with the excess of the execution has meant that Killer Klowns has had a much longer life than others of its ilk. The killer theme song by The Dickies – which manages to include all the salient plot points and more – might also have something to do with it.
The Terror-Fi Film Festival opens today in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Full details can be found at the festival website.
