written & directed by garth maxwell
essential productions limited/new zealand film commission
Wow, what a strange movie this is. Though one never expects an original take when dipping into genre offerings, this New Zealand picture is playing entirely on its own field. And what a field it is … the polar opposite of a “feel-good” film, this neverending litany of miseries only lets up at the very end, with a seemingly tacked-on segment that feels suspiciously like an afterthought, but which instead may not have been meant as a representation of reality. Sometimes it’s rewarding when you finish a viewing wondering what in the hell you just watched, and this feature manages to provoke that same sense of confusion and intrigue throughout its duration. I mean, I had no idea where this one was heading – and given its overall bleakness and the uncomfortably horrific final scenes, I’m fairly glad about that.
why did i watch this movie?
This is another product of the 1990s, and I was lured in by the odd name and convinced by its description as a unique, psychological offering.
should you watch this movie?
Powerful in several different ways, it’s quite an experience if you’re looking for a less typical horror picture, fraught with emotional turmoil. It is not an easy watch.
highlight and low point
Though obviously one must suspend one’s disbelief for certain elements of a picture steeped in the paranormal, the conflict in this flick relies on its grounding in related phenomena without an apparent link or any explanation whatsoever. It’s just sort of dropped in there: oh, by the way, this can happen, too. Since most of the variant otherworldly or mystical manifestations are given at least some backstory, that slight is troubling. Alexis Arquette and Sarah Smuts-Kennedy play long-separated orphaned siblings very believably.
By which I might mean a Philip Glass score that we hear the same snippet of way too often. Oh, and vacuous voiceovers that aim for grandiosity only to land on ostentation.
All right, so retconning this flick to be the sort-of “sequel” to the 1974 original makes sense. It’s at least half great: the first 45 minutes of this black horror comedy work well as a pastiche of the first go-round, with the added amusement of more modern horror motifs … which are basically updates of the original’s template anyway. Both unsettling and darkly humorous – much as the debut was meant to be, and 
A tale of Nature Gone Horribly Wrong, this likable B-movie set in America but filmed in New Zealand proudly blares its very ’90s soundtrack whenever possible. But after dispensing with its Meet Cute (well, sort of; it involves both a dead engine and a dead pet), this chipper horror comedy rather quickly started reminding me of the legendary cult favorite Tremors. Then a completely unexpected detour occurs, and although it’s short and ultimately slight, the film never seems to regain its bearings. From that point onward, the action escalates, things keep exploding, and the characters, finding themselves in one impossible situation after another, seem to devolve as the creatures they’re battling keep rapidly adapting. Maybe that’s supposed to be a parallel. Or a paradox. Whatever it is, it becomes difficult to tell what the producers wished to achieve. Unless it was to remind one of Tremors. It ends abruptly.
The main thing I noticed in this peculiar low-budget pic is that almost all of the actors portraying college students are way too old; along with that factor comes the clumsy nature of the dialogue, somewhat common to B-movies trying to portray “realistic” campus life. Also evident is the off-brand quality of this production. Though a reasonable facsimile of a film a major studio may have made, the differences are definitely noticeable in set design and wardrobe, to name but a few departments. (Several of the performers also appear to be cut-rate imitations of Name Actors.) The coherence of the story – which is otherwise off-the-shelf tomfoolery – is similarly lacking, perhaps because it seems to be missing details that might have shed some light on various characters’ motivations. It is entirely possible I am putting too much thought into my analysis of this tale about some kinda demonic ritual pact. Oh, and the SHOCKING ending isn’t, of course.
SPACE RATS From Outer Space 