THE TOP 5 STRANGE KIWI FILMS

Although Come To Daddy may not take place here or feature Kiwis in the lead roles, director Ant Timpson ensures the film teems with New Zealand’s specific sense of warped unease.

Here are five Kiwi movies that lean into a kind of cinematic strangeness that could only come from our weird country.

Death Warmed Up (1984)

Filmed on

Waiheke

Island, this violent sci-fi splatter nightmare from cult filmmaker David Blyth ( Angel Mine, Wound) was New Zealand’s first proper horror film. A disturbingly young Michael Hurst (the local stage and screen legend who later found international fame in Hercules: The Legendary

Journeys) plays . . . Michael, who is seeking revenge on the mad scientist who brainwashed him into killing his own parents. The skull-opening gruesomeness pre-dated Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste by three years.

Meet The Feebles (1989)

All Jackson’s early films deserve to be on this list but we’re highlighting what is undoubtedly his nuttiest enterprise, an absurdly ambitious satire of The

Muppet Show that revels in gleeful bad taste. In no way brain dead, the film is stuffed with heavenly (puppet) creatures crafted by Richard Taylor, marking the beginning of a fruitful ongoing collaboration with Jackson. It remains remarkable that Meet The Feebles exists; there’s never been anything else like it. Unless you count the recent shameless rip-off,

The Happytime Murders, which served only to highlight Jackson’s mad genius.

Jack Be Nimble (1993)

Garth Maxwell’s one-of-a-kind gothic thriller concerns brother and sister twins adopted to separate families. The girl, Dora (Sarah SmutsKennedy), develops psychic abilities and hooks up with Teddy, a fellow psychic played by Kiwi acting royalty Bruno Lawrence in one of his final performances. The boy, Jack (the late American actor Alexis Arquette, pretransition), endures abuse with an awful farming family and builds a bizarre hypnosis machine to take revenge. Maxwell was influenced by David Lynch and Dario Argento, but Jack Be Nimble oozes a penetrating, ominous Kiwi tone all its own.

The Devil Dared Me To (2007)

A cinematic expansion of Chris Stapp and Matt Heath’s gonzo TV series Back of the Y, this mental action comedy (produced by Ant Timpson) brought a bunch of beloved BOTY characters — guileless daredevil Randy Cambell (Stapp, who also directed), scheming promoter Dick Johansonson (Heath), South Island mechanic Spanners Watson (Phil Brough) — to life on the big screen with hilariously enthusiastic zeal[and]. You will believe a man can jump Cook Strait in a rocket car.

What We Do In The Shadows (2014)

In this singular mockumentary partially inspired by the self-serious tone of Interview with the

Vampire, co-directors/writers/stars Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi showed just how much fun creatures of the night can be when arguing over whose turn it is to do the dishes in a shared Wellington flat. The deadpan tone feels uniquely Kiwi but it was embraced all over the world and generated two TV spinoffs.