Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Kandisha
Sunday, April 28, 2024
Boy Kills World
We live in a decade that's given us a ton of high-energy, high-budget action movies with carefully choreographed combat - all with an excellent level of quality that's got to be a statistical anomaly.
I guess that's where Boy Kills World comes in; Something's got to balance the scales.
Boy (Bill Skarsgård) is a deaf-mute dude who lives with a Shaman (Yayan Ruhian!) in the middle of the jungle. He was taken in as a kid after the evil head of the totalitarian city nearby (Famke Janssen) killed his mom and little sister; The shaman knew his mother, so he subjects boy to a brutal training regimen to turn him into a killing machine with the sole objective on getting revenge against this Van Der Koy family who run the government or... something; this a very, very thinly drawn dystopia that insists on portraying its ruling family more as hacky Hollywood parodies than anything political*. The movie makes a token show of establishing what a bunch of dicks they are - casual oppression and mass murder, a yearly televised culling of known dissidents, being a very superficial caricature of celebrity culture, that sort of thing.
Blood is mostly CGI, providing another layer of artificiality to the proceeds. I tend to roll my eyes at CGI blood in the best of cases, and this movie is a really a good argument in favour of squibs and practical effects; In that surprisingly non-jokey final fight, you'll often see a huge burst of goopy, comic-style blood, followed by a shot showing a floor that's completely free of any splatter.
At least the acting is pretty good, even if it's in the service of these non-entities. Rothe is cool when she's not donning a stupid, unfunny helmet the movie insists on saddling her with (You know you're in trouble when you're ripping off a character from a Ubisoft game), Copley is... well, he's one likeable weirdo, and seems to be having fun. But the movie belongs to Skarsgård; His full-on action hero debut is impressive, and the mix between his comical idiocy mixed in with what's basically peak human form is almost - almost! - enough to make some of the material work. Let's get the man a better John-Wick-like next time.
*: You could say that's a solid satirical point these days, but there's no way I'm giving this movie that much credit.
Saturday, April 27, 2024
Hellbound: Hellraiser II
Fortunately most of the rest of the Hellraiser crew stayed on and, against all odds, good replacements were found for Barker: Tony Randel (who'd done some uncredited editing on the first movie) on the director's chair, and more importantly, Peter Atkins on scripting duties. Atkins, a long-time Barker collaborator (along with Doug Bradley) from his time in avant-garde theater, didn't just get Hellraiser at a fundamental level, he was somewhat ahead of his time in the way that he didn't just deliver more Hellraiser - he and Barker delved into it, expanded it, deconstructed it, made it even weirder.
Hellbound kicks off with a time-honoured cost-cutting measure: padding the runtime with a recap of the previous film's final scenes*. Just hours after facing off against S&M demons, a rapey undead uncle and an evil stepmother, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) wakes up to find herself as an inmate in a psychiatric institution under the care of smarmy, ridiculously posh doctor Channard (Kenneth Cranham) and his hunky, earnest aide Kyle (William Hope).
Once the carnage is finished Kyle finally manages to escape and extracts Kirsty from the asylum. Meanwhile, Channard is busy providing Julia (Clare Higgins) with victims so she can reconstitute herself. There's a confrontation which Kyle doesn't survive [spoilers, don't read the preceding sentence if you haven't seen the movie], and afterwards Channard puts in motion a plan where he uses Tiffany (Imogen Boorman), a previously-introduced autistic girl who's a puzzle-solving prodigy to solve one of his cubes. The whole second half of the movie literally goes to hell, which in the Hellraiser universe is a giant labyrinth full of surreal little nooks, presided over by Leviathan - an unknowable monolithical god that looks like a rhomboidal lighthouse that spews darkness instead of light.
Oh, and the cenobites pop up for a little bit but they don't get a lot to do; if you'll remember, the movie was already in full production before the first one even came out, so no one had any inkling of how big Pinhead would become. This is Kirsty's and Julia's movie, with a side of Chanard and Tiffany; the demons are barely supporting characters.
It's got a lot going on, and not everything works. Hellbound definitely lacks the elegance and simplicity of Hellraiser, but it makes up for it in ambition and weirdness. The film never quite follows the course you'd expect - still, despite some silliness and a fuzzy plot, most of its events make sense.
Because the crew from the first movie is almost all in place, everything that was good there remains good in the sequel. Robin Vidgeon's cinematography really benefits from the enlarged sets, and does well by some wonderful visual ideas like a sterile, completely white apartment - all the better to frame Julia's skinless form. Bob Keen and his team provide some really great work, including a brand new cenobite that makes lovely use of stop motion, and Christopher Young delivers another classic soundtrack - it's not as fresh as the one for the first movie, but it expands on its themes beautifully.
In case you can't tell by now, I'm a fan. I can see the seams and that many things don't strictly work, but it's still a wildly imaginative and original movie. Hellraiser is one of the movies that in many ways made me me, one I rewatch every few years. Hellbound, I hadn't revisited for a long time - more than a decade and a half, probably - but along with Aliens and Dream Warriors, I've considered it the platonic idea of what a sequel should be. Warts and all, I'm very happy to find it still is.
*: While New World provided a bigger budget for the sequel, the movie started filming just as the dollar's value fell precipitously against the British pound - and as the movie was filmed in London (at the legendary Pinewood Studios, no less), the crew suddenly discovered that their budget had been slashed down by a significant amount; Whole planned sequences had to be scrapped. Due to this and studio interference, it's been described by people who worked on it as 'heavily compromised'; It still kicks ass.
Thursday, April 25, 2024
Prospect
Damon (Jay Duplass) and his daughter Cee (Sophie Thatcher) are 'floaters' - space drifters, basically, trying to make a living in the lawless frontier of the far reaches of civilized space. Damon, a very Duplass goofball played straight (though he does get stoned in one scene), has a lead on a prospect on a distant verdant moon, a toxic planet covered in budget-friendly earth-like forests: the location of a valuable pod of organically-generated gems.
Not sure what's up with harsh, cruel sci-fi with young women as protagonists -this would pair well with Vesper- but it does give me hope that we could get an adaptation of Alastair Reynold's Revenger one of these days. I wouldn't want to hype this one too much, as it's a bit on the slight side, but I liked it.
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Portals
Those silly scientists are at it again, running their particle accelerators and trying to create a black holes...
Luckily for everyone, they don't succeed at creating a (presumably tiny) singularity. Those things are a pain, dropping down into planets and starting to eat them from within as they see-saw around their core like a nightmarish, all-consuming 3D spirograph. No, Portals is content to just be a horror movie. So instead of a black hole we get worldwide blackouts and evil 2001-style monoliths popping up all over the place.
The monoliths -portals- are at least somewhat sentient and seem to have an agenda. They can communicate telepathically with whomever they choose, control others, and they can take those they're interested in when they touch their vinyl-like black surface. The invader's motivations are kept mysterious, but are generic enough that their antics never really roused my interest.
When Adam and his family run into a portal in the middle of the highway the movie shifts into the second story, one set in a 911 call center facility. Again, it's initially interesting, and it's a great way to give a sense of the world (or at least, the corner of the world closest to the call center) going to hell, with the lines overloaded with people calling in about weird occurrences. It devolves to hokum pretty quickly once it introduces your typical conspiracy theorist with that laziest of lazy signifiers: a notebook full of creepy portal-related drawings. When a portal appears in the middle of the office, he grabs a gun and starts forcing his co-workers into it, but the situation fails to go anywhere interesting. Directed by Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale.
After a short catchup with Adam the action moves to Jakarta, where sisters Sarah (Salvita Decorte) and Jill (Natasha Gott) get stuck in a multi-story car park with a monolith. This one's almost a zombie movie- the monolith takes over multiple nearby people and forces them to chase after Sarah and her sister. Very well-made on what's clearly a shoestring budget, it's got some impressive and very high-energy stunts (mostly to do with a slow-moving vehicle) and some very, very creepy business involving a pram. I shouldn't have been surprised when I found out it was directed by Timo Tjahjanto; I can't say it redeems the movie or anything, but it's a lot of fun.
The last real segment finishes off Adam's story - it gets a few nice images, an extremely shit Scanners-style headsplosion (CGI, sadly), and some effective nastiness, but especially compared to its strong opening, it's a bit of a disappointment.
Then there's a cool bit of credits, and a surprise fourth mini-story featuring a couple of scientists (Georgina Blackledge and Dare Emmanuel) who gave some exposition as talking heads early in the movie. I love this sort of formal experimentation, but unfortunately the short is completely disposable, a hollow non-story with a poorly rendered gory finale.
So... this one's a bust, sorry. It got made by some of the same brains behind Doors, which came out two years later, including the Boulderlight production company, Brad Mishka, and creator Chris White. They'd get it much better on their second attempt, which for me merits a qualified recommendation- this one's not really worth a watch despite Tjahjanto's best efforts.
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
No One Will Save You
M. Night Shyamalan famously tried to milk suspense out of an alien invasion from your conspiracy-standard grey aliens. Successfully, even - the problem with Signs wasn't the threat, it was the extremely writerly conceits Shyamalan ballasted his script with. Because a doomsday scenario isn't enough to keep viewers engaged, I guess.
Two decades later we get another movie that attempts the exact same thing... and fails for pretty much the exact same reasons.
Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) lives alone in a big old house in the outskirts of a small town. She seems happy, except for her mom being dead and some unspecified trauma. Perky, enthusiastic, and... well, a little too quirky, to be honest, but that's mainly down to the film's gimmick: there are barely any spoken lines at all, so to compensate Dever is directed to emote like there's no tomorrow. The few times anyone does talk, it's way down in the mix, almost unintelligible.
The alien invasion happens on that same night we meet Brynn. She wakes up to some noise downstairs and finds a very noisy, very clumsy little grey man stumbling around. It's a pretty cool variation on a home invasion scene, especially when the alien reveals telekinetic powers. It does raise the same question Signs did - to wit, how the hell did these (space) clowns ever get to interstellar travel?*
Brynn, plucky heroine that she is, survives the attack, and the next morning opts to get the hell out of Dodge - which reveals the next stage of the alien invasion in probably the movie's most effective scene. From there it's a series of confrontations with the greys, putting the poor woman through the wringer, while at the same time slowly explaining why she's a pariah.
Even worse is Brynn's story and the way it integrates with that plot - It's handled so cack-handedly it's hard to take seriously. And when the secret is out... don't get me wrong, it's a horrible thing to happen to anyone, but it's also deeply underwhelming. It completely fails to upend your understanding of the character in any way, and it renders her situation even more simplistic, the society that's shunned her for a decade that much more a caricature.
The whole film is yoked to an idea that doesn't really work and has very little weight. Had her crime been less mundane, harder to forgive - something actually shocking, like, I dunno, a school shooting - maybe it'd be on to something. As it is, there's no substance, no impact.
Why do the aliens find her situation so fascinating? I have no idea; I suspect it's just the script writing itself into a corner yet again. But at least it leads to a deeply contrived, but also really fun ending that finally shows a little of the wit that the rest of the movie sorely lacks.
* No offense to the Killer Klowns from outer space, which are legit. Also: how would they be able to take over any town in America? Brynn manages to take a couple down with her tiny frame, blind luck, and improvised weapons - what happens when they try to invade an average home in the ol' US of A, which I'm led to believe holds multiple John-Wick-style weapon lockers?
Monday, April 22, 2024
Doors / Portal
The pretty cool conceit behind this movie is that the premise is communicated in the interstices, via text infodumps, background chatter and a 'wake up, sheeple!' style podcaster (David Hemphill). The meat of the movie is split in between four shorts, each one set at a specific point during this bizarre invasion, with a focus on the small picture that obscures as much as it illuminates, keeping things mysterious.
The first segment, 'Lockdown', follows a bunch of high-schoolers stuck in detention right when the invasion begins. It's got a nice paranoid feel as the kids hear sirens and helicopters zoom by outside, their phones all going off at once from within a locked cupboard, and their professor abandons them. Pretty shitty of him, to be honest. But unfortunately it quickly loses steam and kind of flounders when the kids run face to face with one of the newly arrived doors.
Then it's time for 'Knockers', which is the dumb name given to the people who go into doors to try to document everything within for science. This is dangerous, we learn, because most of these explorers succumb to some form of psychosis if they stay inside for longer than ten minutes or so.
It begins with some rather beautiful nature footage, as one of the knockers (Lina Esco) muses on her overbearing life partner (Josh Peck)... who's also a knocker. Very Terrence Mallik. But the main influence here is quickly revealed to be Alex Garland's Annihilation as they venture into the other side of a door that's bisected a beautiful woodland house. This is the clear standout story in the movie; The alternate house the party of knockers ventures into is eery, weird, and pretty cool, and while the relationship drama ends predictably, it's narratively satisfying in a way that the rest of the film doesn't really ever manage again.
In 'Lamaj' we catch up with the deadbeat teacher who abandoned the kids in 'Lockdown' (Kyp Malone). He's gone full survivalist out in the woods and has managed to communicate with one of the Doors using some homebrew equipment. The Door is surprisingly friendly and communicative - it's all fairly interesting until he invites a fellow scientist and her plus one, and then some extremely clunky relationship drama ensues again.
Finally it's Midnight Mike's turn, the guy who runs the podcast we've been listening to throughout the movie. He gets an interview with an expert on parallel realities (Darius Levanté), who acts like a spaced-out cult leader and provides some more information on what may be going on. Again, it's kind of interesting - anything that reminds me of Childhood's End will make me perk up and pay attention - but dramatically it's completely inert, and that's a terrible way to wrap up the film.
This is a tough movie to gauge. I really enjoyed its general vibe - and despite a very low budget, it always looks great, with 'Knockers' being again a highlight. I also dug the experimental nature of the filmmaking, which mixes in text, drone shots, and abstract images with its narrative with abandon. The scripts (all written by different people) vary wildly in quality, but none of them are particularly great, with some incredibly clunky exposition (the way characters just blurt out their motivations in Lamaj is near unforgivable). As science fiction none of it has any rigour, nor does it explore any of its ideas satisfactorily, but I do appreciate how much leeway it leaves by design for you to fill in between the lines.
Sunday, April 21, 2024
Abigail
Things pick up considerably once the vampire finally bares its fangs and starts chasing these idiots around, acting for all purposes like a blood-splattered, murderous version of Dee Dee from Dexter's Laboratory. The script (by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick) remains pretty fucking dumb, but the mayhem is well choreographed and the gore is pleasingly over-the-top. It's pretty watchable until it gets to the home stretch and it starts piling up twists like the world's stupidest pancake stack, especially during a final confrontation against a new menace that pissed away any goodwill the film had accrued up to that point.
It's hard to criticise a movie that's clearly going for 'dumb fun' for being overtly stupid, even when that equation leans 90% dumb and 10% fun. But there's a point where cheap contrivances, plot holes and hoary dialog start reeking of half-arsedness, and this movie crosses that threshold very early on; I only have myself to blame for the mild annoyance, because it was patently clear from the trailer that the writing would be terrible.
Friday, April 19, 2024
The First Omen
Like probably a lot of people my age, easy access on TV meant I watched The Omen early and often. I don't think it was particularly formative (embarrassingly, the killer cat in Uninvited featured a lot more in my nightmares than anything lil' Damien and his satanic rottweilers ever got up to), but its emphasis and slow build up to its bizarre deaths and general bleakness must have fucked me up somehow, even if I have next to zero nostalgia for it.
And now, thanks to god knows what satanic shenanigans, we finally get a prequel answering a bunch of questions no one asked themselves in the intervening forty-eight years. Maybe they'll try to remake the original again in a couple of years in time for its fiftieth anniversary.
If nothing else, it's a movie that gets The Omen at a fundamental level, but isn't afraid to have a lot of fun with it too. Witness the prelude to the movie, where two priests -father Brennan (Ralph Ineson, whose voice gave the subwoofers at the cinema a pretty good workout) and father Harris (Charles Dance) meet to discuss some Matters of Grave Import. We know Brennan survives to be in the 1976 movie, but as for the other guy... the film has a lot of fun building up to his death, slathering on tension and compounding it with multiple shots of rickety scaffolding and stained-glass windows being hoisted high up by cranes. And when the inevitable death comes, it's both gruesome and slyly funny.
But it's not time for Brenan yet - he's just a supporting character. The protagonist is Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), an American orphan who arrives in Rome to take her vows under the auspices of Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy).
So when father Brennan returns from the prologue and warns Margaret that something is horribly wrong, it doesn't take much convincing before she's looking for clues about some sort of horrific satanic conspiracy surrounding her ward Carlita. One thing leads to another- in this case, a series of pretty effective, gruesome scenes with an emphasis on body horror, and a deluge of clumsily dosed exposition.
Yes, it's predictable, and having to contort to the shape of a prequel to a movie that seriously didn't need one to begin with hurts it a lot. The shape of its narrative is bent out of whack, and while the mystery starts out being compelling, it's easy to see where the pieces will fall, leaving an obvious twist that leads to the foreordained conclusion - and the way the script (by Tim Smith, Director Arkasha Stevenson and Steve Thomas) cheekily subverts it - an oddly underwhelming experience.
So while The First Omen's story is a bit of a bust, it's full of likeable characters and indelible images. Director Arkasha Stevenson and her cinematographer Aaron Morton craft a lusty, creepy, atmospheric and often gorgeous movie that's highly horror-literate (check out those references to Rosemary's Baby and Possession!). It's not perfect - there are a few too many cheesy jump scares, some dodgy effects, and the big supposedly horrific aftermath to a car accident is handled so ineptly that it had most of the people at the theater I saw this on laughing out loud, which is probably not the intended reaction. But mostly it succeeds, and a couple of standout sequences manage a ridiculous level of intensity.
An eye or a mouth? Guessing the second, based on the prominence of a medieval picture of Satan devouring a fool later. In any case, it looks amazing. |
The themes are strong, if a bit blunt, especially with regards to women's rights over their own bodies; The scenes where they're most made manifest correspond almost one-to-one to the film's best, most harrowing moments. It stumbles when trying to update the original movie's very '70s paranoia for modern audiences (who will probably, and justifiably, tend to mistrust anyone belonging to the catholic church anyways) in a deeply stupid retroactive change to the series' conspiracy trappings. Yes, making a modern-day omen was always going to be an uphill battle, but I'm not about to cut them some slack for a fight they picked.
Nell Tiger Free is a highlight - not that you could tell from her subdued performance, but her Possession-like freakout is towering. Ineson is as likeable (and his voice as uncanny) as ever, and Braga and Nighy are the consummate professionals they've ever been, even if they don't really get a chance to show the young ones how it's done. I found Mark Korven's soundtrack occasionally annoying, but it's faithful to Jerry Goldsmith's original score, and its attempts to replicate a theremin with human voices are pretty entertaining.
More than anything else, Stevenson assured vision marks the addition of another talented, unique voice to the genre - based on this and The Dream Door season for Channel Zero, I can't wait to see what she does next.
Thursday, April 18, 2024
The Ritual
Wednesday, April 17, 2024
The Miracle Warriors (Kei moon duen gap)
The general barely escapes by taking the emperor's son hostage; however, the royal scion accidentally dies during the escape.
Sorcerer Bat (I will never get tired of typing that) is not deterred; he casts himself Mission:Impossible-style masks and manages to kill the old woman with trickery. The old man doesn't fall for it, but to it's clear that bat in not going away any time soon. So he sends Shu-kan to a sort of sorcerer Olympics, where if he wins he will be granted supreme command which he can use to order Bat to fuck off. And you can bet sorcerer Bat's going to try and sabotage that plan.
On the positive side: none of its bad qualities matter. The film is an absolute delight, and even if the more up-front humor fails, there are still a ton of great jokes left; I wish I could share with you one sorcerer's hair-brained attempt to retrieve a key from a bat of boiling oil with his pet fish. "I die before you, my boss!"
In the world of miracle fighters, all - or the vast majority - of magic is achieved with trickery, even when said trickery is based on cartoon physics. So it's always lovely to see what Woo-ping manages to pull off, and even if it sometimes the budget restrictions show through, it feels thematic somehow, and part of the movie's more than considerable charm. There's a fight with a wooden building block automaton, tons of infractions against the laws of physics, a few fights where dummy body parts are used to great effect, optical illusions, phantasm-style killer spinning tops, a cat's cradle combat... the list goes on, and on and on.
There's quite a few fights, too, of course - all rapid-fire and precisely choreographed. I adored this one when I was a kid and it's just as much of a joy to watch as an adult.
Monday, April 15, 2024
The Guest
Before writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard completely missed the point of The Blair Witch Project and moved on to make a couple of silly american Kaiju movies, they put out a couple of pretty cool horror movies and early contributions to the V/H/S series. Out of all of them my favorite is 2014's The Guest, which sort of straddles the line between their nastier slasher films and the more over-the-top stuff that followed by way of a pastiche of gritty, mid-budget '80s genre stuff.
As a homage, it's an unqualified success - it really feels like a relic from that time, to the point where it's a bit jarring when someone pulls out a laptop to burn a CD mixtape (which is already a time capsule in its own right; Ugh, I feel old). But the movie's neatest trick is that it wrangles all of its influences to power a really fun, knowingly silly story played (at least until the very final line) with a completely straight face.
The Petersons - particularly mom (Sheila Kelley) and dad (Leland Orser) - are still mourning their son Caleb, lost in combat somewhere the Middle East.
Enter David Collins (Dan Stevens), who pops up unannounced on their front door one fine summer day; David was a friend of Caleb's, and he's following up on a promise to check in on his family.
The movie is nearly half-done before David kills some people on-screen, and the movie brilliantly keeps his motivations and plan fuzzy. It's a moot point, anyhow, as when the military find out where he is and send a team of mercenaries headed by the great, late Lance Reddick, those plans are scuppered. The movie briefly shifts gears from thriller into action territory, before settling in for a more intimate, blood-soaked finale which, OK, does pay its respects to Cameron.
It's a brilliant mish-mash, convincing in any of the disguises it dons. The thriller aspects are suitably outrageous (love David's sage counsel to Luke), and the action is meaty and knows to show shell the casings from a light machinegun bouncing in slow motion on the dusty floor; Incidentally, I really miss when low-ish-budget stuff like this could still use explosives to depict bullet hits on a house and not CGI sparks and dust puffs.
Unlike most of the nostalgia-fuelled films of the last couple of decades, The Guest feels more like it could sit comfortably among its influences rather than just stare at them from a distance; I've filed it away in my mind next to The Hitcher, in all its (Roy?) batty glory. And that's really high praise, dammit!
Sunday, April 14, 2024
Monkey Man
Saturday, April 13, 2024
Civil War
Friday, April 12, 2024
Stake Land 2 / The Stakelander
It's in that combat arena where Martin finally finds Mister. They quickly team up, along with a feral woman (Laura Abramsen). They have some scuffles with the brotherhood, team up with some former associates of Mister's (A.C Peterson and Steven Williams), and make a last stand against the forces of the brotherhood and the Mother, whose motivations are a little bit more involved than it first appeared.
In any case, it's all a moot point because they missed the chance to call it Stake Land 2: Stakelander. I'm not sure I have it in me to forgive them for that.
Thursday, April 11, 2024
Shadows
Alma (Mia Threapleton) and Alex (Lola Peticrew) live with their mother (Saskia Reeves) in a derelict hotel in the middle of the woods. An unspecified cataclysm has come to pass, making daylight dangerous for the girls due to some unspecified presence. Only the mother goes out to hunt, and even then, always at night time.
Italian/Irish co-production Shadows is a fairly straightforward... let's call it post-apocalyptic psychological thriller; There's something almost old-fashioned about it, a confident, unhurried pace that lets us spend time with the girls as events escalate towards an inevitable confrontation with their Mother. There's a couple of twists - one of them fairly easy to guess, the other one completely unnecessary, both of them unoriginal - but it's a satisfactory ending nonetheless.
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
Alien Addiction
I normally try to avoid stoner comedies. If you've ever been sober around stoned people, you'd probably understand why; They find anything funny. For every Smiley Face or Harold & Kumar movie you get tons of quarter-assed shit like... I dunno- Dude, Where's My Car? or Your Highness, to give a couple high-profile examples; Lots of mugging, a high (ha!) concept, and tired, hacky juvenile humour.
Case in point: 2018's Alien Addiction, which has the distinction of being the first Kiwi comedy that's completely failed to make me even chuckle a single. Fucking. Time.
...Yeah, this seems about right. |
These aliens have come to earth to... suck things up into a sort of high-tech bong and smoke them, as part of a science survey or something. They almost immediately run into a tourist taking a shit in the woods and, mistaking her turd for an offering, they blaze it up... and get high on it.
In their subsequent hunt for non-metaphorical good shit, they run into Riko while he's masturbating in the shower. He ends up agreeing to act as their supplier, looking for ever more pungent shit. This somehow leads to Jacinta (JoJo Waaka), a very overweight woman whose shit the aliens get addicted to. Oh, and Jacinta has a sex drive, isn't that hilarious? Well, no, but the film disagrees to the point where there are almost as many "jokes" about that as there are about the aliens' quest for feces. Thomas Sainsbury pops up as some sort of tabloid reporter hunting for the aliens later on, but sadly he's as unfunny as anything else in this film.
As the plot above should make clear, this is a gleefully crude, offensive, juvenile movie. It's built around toilet humour and fat jokes - you know, the sort of thing people keep insisting 'wouldn't get made today'. Going by this movie, that might have more to do with quality control than any type of wokeness.
There's exactly one ingenious idea in the whole movie: at one point one of the characters tries to lure the aliens with stool samples, in a way that ineptly parallels the way Reese's Pieces were used in E.T. Other than that, it's all deeply lazy crap. It's so devoid of ideas that at several points the script just... gives up and lets Riko mug or dance for the camera, something that never fails to get old almost immediately. Jackson seems like he may be fun to hang around with, but he sure as hell doesn't make material as turgid as this worth watching. The same goes for everyone else in this pretty much worthless film.
As low-effort as... well, almost everything here is, writer/director/cinematographer/editor Shae Sterling at least ensures that the film is competently shot, with lots of very crisp footage of its lovely New-Zealand setting - That's no small thing! His choice of compositions and comic timing, however, are basic at best.
This is probably ok to watch with chemical assistance, but then again, so are the Teletubbies.