Our heroes dissect the zombified car that is the eighth instalment of the Fast franchise.
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Fast and the Furious - Tokyo Drift
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Saturday, 17 October 2026
The James Bond Cocktail Hour: Fate of the Furious (F. Gary Gray, 2017)
BITE-SIZED: Event Horizon (Paul W. S. Anderson, 1997)
Seven years after it disappeared, the experimental space craft Event Horizon has reappeared. A rescue team, led by Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) and the ship’s designer, Dr. Weir (Sam Neill), are dispatched
Paul W.S. Anderson was such a critical punching bag for so long - and he spent so long in Resident Evil, I was never curious enough to check out his films.
I enjoyed his remake of Death Race.
After Sam Neill passed, Event Horizon kept coming up as one of the gems in his filmography.
I have seen this movie before, and I remembered snobbily thinking it was a junky riff on The Shining - nowadays, that is a selling point.
The filmmakers are taking the right lessons from its inspirations - particularly in the production design, and the focus on establishing the crew (similar to Alien). The one thing it misses is the smoky chiaroscuro utilised in the previous era of Hollywood sci-fi (like a lot of nineties movies, it seems a shade over-lit).
The cast are solid, but Laurence Fishburne is remarkable - he brings so much gravity to his role, it immediately raises the stakes.
Fishburne’s captain is an uber-professional. He makes you aware of the distance this team has to travel, the effort to get them out there, and just how perilous space travel is.
The film was famously hacked to pieces. You can feel it in the third act - Joely Richardson goes from feeling like a second lead to mostly out of the picture until the finale.
The film manages some unsettling moments - the brief video of the original Event Horizon crew, possessed crew member Justin (Jack Noseworthy) in the airlock, Weir’s final transformation - and has a fantastically bleak sense of atmosphere.
I cannot say I am a full convert to its cause, but on its own terms, Event Horizon is a solid addition to the sub-genre of intergalactic horror.
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Saturday, 10 October 2026
NZ Horror: The Lost Tribe (John Liang, 1983)
When his twin brother Max disappears, and becomes the chief suspect in a murder inquiry, Edward (John Bach) returns to the site of his brother’s last appearance - a remote island, once home to a tribe which mysteriously disappeared…
Only released in NZ in 1985, The Lost Tribe is one of the New Zealand films I have been most excited to see.
This was one of the films featured in Sam Neill and Judy Rymer’s Cinema of Unease - only one clip featured, but it has haunted me for 20 years.
I finally found a copy of the film, in time for October - the perfect month for viewing.
Written and directed by Jim Liang (Beyond a Reasonable Doubt), the film starts out as whodunit, as the missing Max’s twin is fingered by police for the murder of a sex worker.
Intriguing and atmospheric, The Lost Tribe takes its time, gradually leaving the familiarity of the police procedural behind for something more internal and messy - the family dynamic.
Made more uncanny by the narration (being performed by a child actor in a whisper), The Lost Triberefuses to offer any explanation for the strange goings on - is our protagonist being tormented by the ghosts of the indigenous people whose graves his brother disturbed? Or is the isolated island the perfect catalyst for unleashing deep-seated issues he has tried to bury?
I can see why it was signposted in Cinema of Unease - it is almost the perfect example of Sam Neill’s thesis, as a pakeha man struggles to impose his will upon a land he has no real relationship with.
Once Edward and Ruth are on the island, their deepest desires take over - and as night falls, the island begins to work on them.
While the build up is well-handled, I found the initial supernatural encounter a little lackluster - this might have something to do with watching a copy on YouTube on a laptop.
There might be something I am missing in terms of the sound design, and exterior night scenes did not come across that well.
The sequence has potential:
Edward and Ruth are under a sense of siege - while they have a gun, it does not provide any sense of security - if anything, it feels like a time bomb, the promise of violence underpinning the couple’s tense dynamic.
The brother’s conflict over the same woman is ultimately more unsettling than the potential supernatural elements
What does not help is that Edward does not appear to be the most stable person - there is an undercurrent of rage to Bach’s performance, a volatility that stands out in a movie whose forte is understatement.
When Ruth abandons Edward to patrol the island alone, it feels like a fuse has been lit for some kind of conflagration (it is from this final section of the film that we get the key image lifted by Cinema of Unease: Edward shouting at the forest while brandishing a machete).
While the film has been eerie up until this point, it has started to feel a little listless.
Now there is a sense of tension, a sense that the film is heading to some unknown destination. While that shot with the machete I mentioned earlier has a certain power, the shot that stuck with me comes shortly afterward - a moving shot of Edward’s feet stomping through his brother’s survey site, nervily hacking through the survey lines.
The film takes a turn for the gothic, with Edward’s discovery of the preserved tribesmen in a cave, and finally a nightmarish confrontation with his brother that raises more questions than it answers:
Is Max real? Was he ever real?
These questions are rendered irrelevant, and the film ends on a perverse family reunion - a mockery of togetherness where none of the underlying tensions have been resolved.
Strikingly photographed and well acted - if a little low key, The Lost Tribe is one film I would love to watch on the big screen - watching it the way I did, I feel like I need another viewing to fully get onboard with it.
Even if it (questionably) does not quite make the landing, it is conceptually fascinating, and it has stuck with me far longer than I expected it to.
Related
If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour.
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Friday, 9 October 2026
NZ Horror: Bad Taste (Peter Jackson, 1987)
When a small town’s population disappears, the Astro Investigation and Defence Service (Peter Jackson, Terry Potter, Pete O'Herne, Mike Minett and Craig Smith) arrive to investigate.
They are soon pitched into battle with the forces of Lord Crumb (Doug Wren and Peter Vere-Jones), an alien fast food mogul who wants human flesh for his products.
To celebrate the season, I am focusing on New Zealand genre movies. This is part of a more general push towards covering more local films next year.
This year, I have been testing out themed months to break the blog out of the same genres.
This month’s theme was also an excuse to cover a clutch of movies I have never seen.
I have seen most of the key texts (Utu, Braindead) but New Zealand genre cinema is not something I have dived into with any depth.
It is an excuse to finally tick off a film I should have covered years ago.
Peter Jackson was a major filmmaker of my youth - I came back to live in New Zealand around the time he had started LOTR, so that whole arc of his success was happening around the time I was getting more interested in movies, and it felt like New Zealand culture was becoming more open to the industry.
The handmade qualities of Bad Taste - the guns, masks and prosthetics, and the cast of friends playing a cast of dozens - are key. This sense of imagination and how it is pulled off gives Bad Taste its unique energy.
I read about its production in Ian Pryor’s unauthorised biography 20-something years ago, and that knowledge of its making does not take away from the overall effect - it only enhances it.
The film does not take its time getting to the goods, starting with roving camerawork and an impressively grue-y puppet of a headless corpse.
Assembled over four years, the story-telling is ragged, but it is so unpredictable, and keeps introducing new ideas with so much style, it just about carries it off.
The characters are a collection of weirdos: Jackson himself plays multiple roles, including the vague protagonist Derek, a nerdy alien scientist who becomes a deranged killer - he wears a Rambo-esque band to keep his brain in his fractured skull. He also plays Robert, a hulking brute who is the major muscle of the aliens, but proves to be less savvy as a fighter (in one of the most inspired setpieces, these characters fight each other).
There are a few dull patches, and aside from Jackson’s outsized turn, the acting is rote.
You have to allow for the fact this is a group of friends, and to the film’s credit, that chemistry is clear - and there is a catharsis to watching this group of friends pull the movie off.
The occasional fan reference (a sign points toward Stephen King’s Castle Rock) adds to the film as a gumbo that turns into something original.
Considering where Jackson’s career ended up, there is a certain poignancy to the film - its scrappy sense of independence and invention almost feel like a repudiation of his latter career.
So many films have tried to take influence from its delightfully anarchic approach to genre, violence and humour, but there is an outsider quality, an incredibly clear sense of individuality to Bad Taste, that keeps it unique.
Related
If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour.
You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you enjoy something I wrote, and want to support my writing, here’s a link for tips!
Saturday, 3 October 2026
NZ Horror: Sleeping Dogs (Roger Donaldson, 1977)
After discovering his wife (Nevan Rowe) has had an affair with his best friend (Ian Mune), Smith (Sam Neill) abandons his family for a deserted island.
While Smith returns to land from exile, he finds the world he left behind has changed:
Spurred on by industrial unrest and some false flag actions, the New Zealand government has become a dictatorship, with an armed resistance movement and American military ‘advisors’ on-hand to fight them.
When he is arrested by the regime, Smith is forced to go on the run as a fugitive,
A resistance fighter by circumstance, will Smith have what it takes to save his family - and his country?
To celebrate the spooky season, The Midnight Ramble will be exploring a cinematic region it has only sparingly covered: New Zealand horror and genre cinema.
To inaugurate this programme, we start with Roger Donaldson’s nightmare vision of a near-future dystopia.
While modest on its own terms, Sleeping Dogs marked a landmark in New Zealand film when it was released in 1977.
The first New Zealand feature in over a decade (since John O’Shea’s Don’t Let It Get You), its success - along with new works by other filmmakers like Geoff Murphy - led to the creation of the New Zealand Film Commission.
I read the source novel, Smith’s Dream, as a teen. I was interested in alternative history and dystopian fiction, and it was one of the few local examples of the genre.
I watched Sleeping Dogs around the same time and remember being underwhelmed by it.
After Sam Neill passed away, I wanted to give it another look.
In light of the government’s increasingly authoritarian bent - and the US’s dropping its mask around the rules-based international order - it also felt appropriate for a reappraisal.
Written as an anti-Vietnam allegory, that message is somewhat muffled in the transition to film.
In its favour, Sleeping Dogs features some good photography, and some solid attempts at suspense.
However, the script is awash in cliches, aiming for a New Holllywood-style cynicism, but coming off as a vaguely competent action thriller.
The local cast range from fine to wooden: Neill would rubbish his performance but his unease is belayed by an inherent charisma.
American import Warren Oates adds some welcome swagger as an special forces commander who befriends Smith.
An important film in the history of NZ film, and an early showcase for future luminaries.
On its own terms, Sleeping Dogs is a crude but occasionally effective thriller.
With the direction NZ and world politics have taken in recent years, the film has a new sense of urgency that has more danger than the Muldoon-era fable was intended to evoke.
Related
If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour.
You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you enjoy something I wrote, and want to support my writing, here’s a link for tips!
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