The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
This is a listing of genre works made in New Zealand. Though a small country – an area larger than the UK but with a population of only around three million, reaching four million in 2003 and five million in 2020 – it has a reasonable cinematic output.
It is of a surprise that NZ did not make its first feature film until 1977 – the same year that Hollywood produced Star Wars (1977) – with Sleeping Dogs (1977). The success of such saw the creation of the government-backed New Zealand Film Commission, which oversaw the funding of local films. With films not part of a studio system, there was no necessary need for those produced to make their money back, leading to an odd and eclectic output of art films and dramas, cultural works and eccentric B movies.
The success story of the country was Peter Jackson’s emergence in the 1980s and move to award-winning filmmaker in the 1990s and then the huge success of his The Lord of the Rings trilogy. This in turn led to institution of the Weta Workshop, which has become one of the leading visual effects houses in the world. The Lord of the Rings and the generous tax subsidies that came with it, not to mention the country’s promotion of a clean green image, also led to the increased popularity of NZ as an international filming location.
NZ filmmakers to conduct multiple genre works include:- David Blyth, Niki Caro, Roger Donaldson, Gerard Johnstone, Peter Jackson, Jonathan King, Geoff Murphy, Sam Pillsbury, Gaylene Preston, Scott Reynolds, Glenn Standring, Ant Timpson, Vincent Ward and Taika Waititi.
Unique anthology that offers 26 episodes from different directors, each ending with a death. The episodes vary wildly in quality but a sufficient number ignore all good taste and/or travel waaaay across taboo lines
Sequel to the hit multi-director anthology has a less high-profile line-up of directors, nor hits the astonishingly perverse heights of its predecessor. As always some entries never do much but the film finds its stride in the last few episodes
Film based on true-life New Zealand mass murderer Stanley Graham, a disenfranchised farmer who became a local hero after shooting several police and inspiring a massive manhunt
Peter Jackson first appeared with this no-budget splatter comedy. A miracle of DIY filmmaking, the film plays out like a live-action Roadunner cartoon where the creativity of Jackson’s home-made gore effects is positively ingenious
An enthusiastically gore-drenched New Zealand comedy about mutant sheep, this favourably harkens back to the heyday of Peter Jackson’s early splatter films
One of Peter Jackson’s early films, which is maybe the funniest zombie comedy ever made. This becomes a work of unparalleled genius in the glorious gore-drenched excesses it reaches for
New Zealand-made variation on the Backwoods Brutality film with a group of trampers being hunted through the bush by a psychopathic farmer
Adaptation of a book by NZ author Margaret Mahy. Mahy has a sublimely poetic turn of phrase in the writing but the film strips the book down to the point we get no more than a by-the-numbers Young Adult work
New Zealand-made film about a trio of parapsychologists investigating a reputedly haunted farmhouse. This treads very familiar ground and ultimately suffers from a sedate approach
Adaptation of a Lord Dunsany story, this has an appealingly eccentricity – a film told as a series of after dinner conversations about a man recalling his past life as a dog – that works with winning charms
The first horror film from New Zealand, a gore drenched effort about a mad scientist creating zombies. Directed by much energy even if it suffers a complete lack of plot
Outrageous New Zealand-made effort that fondly recalls the 1980s splatter comedies of Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson et al. This often feels like former teen metalheads looking back and puncturing the pretensions of their youth
New Zealand-made WWII horror film with a set-up – Nazis encountered occult forces in a bunker – that draws heavily on The Keep. Modestly effective and gore-drenched
A homemade New Zealand film that attempts to pull an ambitious time travel story that takes place in multiple era with temporal police intervening after a scientist invents a time portal
From the producers of the ABCs of Death films, a further horror anthology where nine directors from around the world deliver eight episodes based on the folklore of their region
A no-budget New Zealand-made film about a student who makes the realisation he is living in a haunted flat. This delivers everything with some modest spooky effect
A New Zealand-made film where a sound effects artist is haunted by the ghost of a woman who steps out of a biopic about Henri Toulouse-Lautec that he is editing
New Zealand comedy in which a teenage daughter discovers that her father Temuera Morrison is a modern-day Maori cannibal cultist. Everything is given a very broad playing
Before The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson flopped badly with this ghost comedy. Jackson allows his obsession with the effects technology to take over at the expense of much else and provides little that is funny
Documentary devoted to a fan following that grew up around Bret McKenzie who had only a single shot appearance as an elf in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
New Zealand director David Blyth directs a ghost story that draws on Chinese supernatural. Blyth seems to be straining to generate anything vaguely spooky
New Zealand director David Blyth’s children’s film starring Al Lewis (the grandpa from tv’s Te Minsters) as a grandfather vampire is a toothless oddity that fails to work
New Zealand-made film about criminal dealings also involving clairvoyance in a series of daring editing schemes that recall something of Don’t Look Now
Peter Jackson emerged to wide acclaim with this film based on a true-life New Zealand murder. It is also a film of absurd pretensions where Jackson seems less interested in the real incident and more distracted by effects trickery
Incomprehensible New Zealand film about a group of camp counselors being haunted by something as they run through the woods
After two bloated and over-padded Hobbit films, Peter Jackson finally gets it together and produces what everyone was expecting him to deliver, even if it means dragging one battle scene out to last an entire film
Peter Jackson returns to J.R.R. Tolkien and epic-sized adventure in the first of his Hobbit films. The visual sweep is there but the film feels over-extruded and over-burdened by its own self-importance.
The Hobbit became Peter Jackson’s equivalent of the Star Wars prequels and this is the weakest work he has produced under the J.R.R. Tolkien banner. Five picaresque chapters of the book are extruded into bloated set-pieces
An NZ-made haunted house comedy that runs through a frenzied array of genre plot devices, a couple of minor jumps and some easy middle-of-the-road laughs leaving you feeling there should have been more to it
A New Zealand-made entry into the zombie comedy stakes. This has the amusing idea of having a zombie outbreak occur during the shooting of a zombie film
A New Zealand-made film about a crime writer joining a party tramping through the bush as the group starts to be killed off by one among their number
A New Zealand-made horror film with Karl Urban as an anthropology lecturer who debunks the occult who is targeted and forced to go on the run from a Satanist cult
An over-the-top New Zealand-made Gothic horror with Alexis Arquette and Sarah Smuts-Kennedy as psychically connected brother and sister who set out on a quest to find their parents, killing all in the way
The story of a young Nazi boy who has Adolf Hitler as an imaginary companion gained awards acclaim but swings between Hogan’s Heroes slapstick and a tender story about overcoming racial prejudice
A New Zealand-made horror comedy. Oddly this is not, as the title might suggest, about a possessed sofa but a possessed recliner chair
Peter Jackson’s dream project, a remake of the 1933 film, and his finest work as a filmmaker. Jackson builds the original out considerably and his command of the effects gives us something quite dazzling
A New Zealand-made horror film in which two friends find themselves trapped in a small rural town where the dead keep returning to life
Quite good New Zealand made film about mysterious happenings during a hike into the bush, where what is happening is kept in a state of careful ambiguity
Peter Jackson wowed the world with this first part of his adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy. This is epic filmmaking and one that shows Jackson in full command of his craft
The weakest of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. This is the most variant from the source material and the one where Jackson allows his tendency to visual effects bloat to take over
Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings saga truly gains its feet here, expanding out onto an epic scale where he has fused special effects and story into a singular vision
Enigmatic New Zealand-made film that takes place in an incredibly haunted landscape about the disappearance of an anthropologist searching for a lost tribe
A film about a dead girl trying to stop her paedophile murderer from the afterlife. A grim story becomes a visual effects vehicle wrecked by Peter Jackson’s overblown amateur hour symbolism
Peter Jackson‘s second film, what might be called The Muppet Show by way of John Waters, an inspired work of puppet depravity that makes a beeline for bad taste
There have been some very sophisticated time paradox films in recent years. At complete contrast, this is a comedy that has a great deal of fun with the premise of a guy and assorted temporal copies of himself running about
Peter Jackson written-produced film that creates a fascinatingly original world. As always with a Jackson film, all the fun is in the massively scaled effects sequences and the design of the world. Alas, Jackson is not as well attuned in the story department, which often drags up corny cliched scenes
New Zealand-made ghost story where Heather Bolton buys a second-hand car only to find it is haunted
The hugely underrated Vincent Ward makes a film about Mediaeval pilgrims travelling through time to the present. Shot in an series of extraordinary images that show how bewildering the modern world would be to them
Frustratingly enigmatic film where student Carly Pope is drawn into a game of mysterious clues where people are being killed
Obscure, little seen but beautifully made Magical Realism film set amongst witches and romantic rivalry in Mexico
New Zealand made film about a woman who falls under the influence of a sinister stranger who plies her with drugs
Film based on a true-life shooting spree in the tiny nowhere New Zealand town of Aramoana
Conceptually ambitious New Zealand made film set in an alternate history where vampires live alongside humans
Very strange New Zealand-made film that starts out seeming to be an abduction thriller and then turns into an even stranger ghost story that we cannot be sure is happening or all in the heroine’s imagination
Quirkily eccentric and surreal New Zealand made comedy about a couple living on a farm
Evocative New Zealand-made Last People on Earth drama. Although the film reaches a frustrating ending that leaves much unanswered, the earlier scenes showing a man alone in a deserted world have an uncommon poetry
A New Zealand-made ghost story that hardly seems to have been seen by anybody. The film shuffles around cliches from 1970s ghost story tv movies but only dissembles them into an embarrassingly silly film where very little of substance is directed with a ludicrously overwrought intensity
Vincent Ward is one of the directors who should be granted more opportunities to make films. This is his least satisfying work, a troubled behind-the-scenes epic set during New Zealand’s Maori Wars with some Magical Realist touches
Rather good New Zealand made horror film set in a geriatric home with Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow engaged in a series of psychological games as a stroke-impaired Rush tries to stop a murderous Lithgow
Uneven New Zealand-made film where a girl meets a mystery man who claims that he is Jesus Christ
Fine Coming of Age story set in 1950s New Zealand with John Carradine as a sinister stranger come to town
Chloe Grace Moretz stars in a quite reasonable WWII-set story about gremlins amok aboard a plane
New Zealand made film about a deafmute boy in a Cook Islands tribe and his mystic communion with a sea turtle
The cornerstone of the modern New Zealand film industry – the first film of both Sam Neill and Roger Donaldson – a vigorous dystopian action film that offers up a nightmare of sleepy parochial 1970s NZ being brutally overrun by the imagery of totalitarianism
Melanie Lynskey stars in a New Zealand road movie that becomes a meta film interrogating the imagery of the American road movie
A New Zealand-made monster movie where a venture down into an old water tank succeeds in disturbing an amphibian creature
Incredibly tepid New Zealand horror film about an American tattooist who unleashes evil forces after he appropriates Samoan cultural tattoos
Woman directed New Zealand horror film where Annie Whittle is attacked by a mysterious assailant
There is a fantastically witty idea here – a low-tech parody of the 1980s post-holocaust film – but one that seems in search of an accompanying film. The film overspills with retro ephemera and stylistic jokes but I wish there had been more to it beyond the hook of the initial joke
A New Zealand made serial killer thriller that emulates The Silence of the Lambs but becomes distracted by directorial effect
Big screen version of a classic New Zealand children’s story, directed by Jonathan King with an emphasis on gooey creature effects
Oddball New Zealand-made comedy with various characters in pursuit of a statuette with rejuvenative properties
Whale Rider director Niki Caro makes an uneven film about a 19th Century peasant who is inspired to make wine by an angel
Magical Realist tale set among New Zealand’s native Maori peoples concerning a young girl’s cautious defiance of traditions
Hands down, this is the best vampire comedy ever made. An incredibly witty effort that contrasts the cliches of the genre with the mundane business of a group of vampires flatting together in New Zealand. A film that comes with sly deadpan gags packed into the corner of every frame
New Zealand-made horror film about two nurses being stalked at a remote hopsital
Excellent thriller set around a roadside diner where Radha Mitchell becomes caught between parties hunting the other where seems to be who they appear
Strange surrealist New Zealand made film that emerges as a Brothers Grimm fairytale as directed by a David Lynch or a Guy Maddin
The always interesting David Blyth returns to screens with what feels like an amateur remake of Nicolas Roeg’s Track 29 that becomes a confused and plotless mishmash of hallucinations, random BDSM scenarios and shock effects