Aidee Walker and<br>Kate Elliott
Film
Night of the Waikato dead
by Philip Matthews
THE LOCALS
Directed by Greg Page; R13, contains violence and horror scenes.
How grateful are the dead? Not very, according to Greg Page’s slim but enjoyable backwoods-horror revamp The Locals. This genre is as old as the hills that have eyes – in fact, Page’s scenario of unprepared city boys pitted against the primitive, feral and murderous has definite echoes of Deliverance, right down to some juicy humans-as-livestock imagery – but Page, a young music-video director making his first film, finds one or two new angles. Not the least of them is his inspired casting of the Waikato as New Zealand’s version of Deliverance’s primeval south. Waikato: the home of rock radio, the site of lush farmland and, now, a violent playground for the living dead.
Page’s material might suggest Bill and Ted meet The Evil Dead. Sensitive Grant (John Barker) and clownish Paul (Dwayne Cameron) leave Auckland for a weekend of surfing somewhere down country. The boys threaten the world record for use of the word “bro” by white guys. Grant has recently been dumped by his girlfriend, but, like PeterJackson’s horrors and unlike most American ones, the film is remarkably chaste – Page is more sentimental about mateship than romance. Against a soundtrack of the Datsuns and the D4 – Page has made clips for both; the momentary appeal of bogan retro is part of the film’s spirit – Grant and Paul drive south.
The deepest Kiwi heartland reveals itself as a freaky timewarp, and not in the usual way. Grant and Paul meet two girls in mid-80s party dress – as the story takes place over one night, actresses Kate Elliott and Aidee Walker’s form of eternal damnation is never to be allowed to wear anything else – witness a colonial-era murder that suggests a recent re-reading of The Scarecrow and stumble upon a hilarious and spectacular accident involving two bogans who are said to date from 1977, but could as easily be missing members of the Datsuns. This collection of spooks – call them the Fairly Evil Dead – are doomed to replay their torments night after night.
Although most horrors in this tradition have a raw, cheap and very nasty quality, Page’s film suggests a well-made B-movie with some of the rougher edges taken off – the production values are strong, from Victoria Kelly’s orchestral score, which is occasionally reminiscent of Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings score, to Bret Nichols’s cinematography, which magically finds light sources in remote areas that have no street lights (in the press notes, Page cops to cheating). If every New Zealand fantasy and horror director has to get past the legacy and gigantic influence of Peter Jackson, how does Page compare? Although he has a similar investment in character, and a similar talent for getting good, likeable performances from his leads, Page’s film doesn’t have the inventive and outrageous mania of Jackson’s splatter movies (actually, the master’s work is quite slyly namechecked: Grant and his girlfriend fought because one committed the near-treasonable offence of not liking Lord of the Rings). Although there is gore, there is seldom mayhem.
But there is an atmosphere that New Zealand films have rarely caught. The “westie” comedy Savage Honeymoon was a little too self-conscious about its “westie” stereotypes – it could never quite shake off those quotemarks. This feels more convincing. Page conceived of The Locals on solo night drives between Auckland and Hamilton and, besides having some of the feel of the place about it, it also has some very good car action (all the more remarkable considering that its high-speed car chases were shot on unsealed roads at night; on occasion, this resembles the ultimate safe-driving scare campaign). Arguably, The Locals is even more of a car movie than it is a horror movie, but a car movie with a gloomy undertone: dark side of the hoon.
