Hip-hop farce truly good fun

Ilike that the TVNZ OnDemand service continues to offer films and shows that are often far more interesting and watchable than anything on its TV channels. The Great Hip Hop Hoax is a perfect example. The story is so unlikely, outlandish and tailormade for a tell-all doco that, for a few minutes, I wondered if I was watching a mockumentary.

But no, the story of the two young men from Dundee, Scotland, who conned Sony Music into giving them a lucrative deal by pretending to be from California is true.

Silibil ’n’ Brains (Billy Boyd and Gavin Bain to their mums) were talented, ambitious and had a perfect sense of what to bring to rock a room.

The only trouble was that no record company or club owner would even give them a shot south of the border. And opportunities for super stardom are lean indeed, especially if you can’t first make it in England without being dismissed as ‘‘the rapping Proclaimers’’. Ouch.

So the duo did what any aspiring pair of up-andcoming gods of hip-hop would do. They invented a backstory for themselves that involved meeting at a rap battle in San Francisco, touring the world and now looking for gigs in London.

Sony, apparently not even bothering to Google the boys’ claims, basically offered to sign them as soon as they had a manager, which they also accomplished by lying through their teeth to secure one of the most successful music managers in the United Kingdom.

The Great Hip Hop Hoax is a story so good that it can only be true.

Boyd and Bain emerge as a pair of basically likeable chancers who got caught up in their own lie and lived it for two eventful years, before they came clean.

As the film proves, they had more than enough talent and charisma to make it, if not for the idiocy of the record company executives who valued image over music at all times.

Alternatively, dropping unannounced on to Netflix in the past couple of weeks, is a pretty good psychological horror from our friends in the West Island.

Sweet River is set in the lush north of Queensland, among the cane fields and simmering resentments that rural Australia apparently cannot exist without.

Grieving mother Hannah has moved to town, ‘‘for a change of scenery’’, she claims. But her real agenda might have a lot more to do with a serial killer who plied his trade in the area years before.

Sweet River isn’t great, but there’s enough quality to hold your attention and not insult your intelligence too egregiously.

Lisa Kay ( Heartbeat) holds the film together, as the embattled Hannah.