Fresh Meat
Temuera Morrison, Nicola Kawana, Hanna Tevita - Dir: Danny Mulheron

I missed this homegrown action horror comedy at the movies as did – considering its box office take – most people. Which is a shame because I was completely blown away by its gleeful mix of sex, violence and kitsch Kiwi culture.
It arrives with the same unselfconscious confidence and no-holds-barred attitude that characterised Peter Jackson's early films. And it's very funny.
There's a charming sweetness amongst the blood as an affluent Maori family – Morrison's unpublished author and his celebrity chef wife (Kawana) – change their diet to fine dining cannibalism. 'You know those pork and rosemary pies we sent you?” they tell their daughter (horny, lesbian, just back from boarding school), 'That wasn't pork.”
It certainly makes their suburban home an unfortunate hiding place for an escaped murderer and his desperate gang.
There's a slight lag in the middle but, overall, this is brilliant stuff, taking unexpected directions and delivering moments of sublime weirdness. In fact, this is just the sort of film I'd love worldwide audiences to see. If it seems weird here it's going to leave them completely gob-smacked.

Compliance comes across as a strange real-life variation of the famous Stanford prison experiment (also referenced on film as The Wave, The Experiment and others). Based on several true incidents, it takes place in a fast food outlet where the down-to-earth manager gets a call from someone claiming to be a police officer. She, as instructed, detains a young female staff member accused of theft. Then, on further command, the employee is searched, then strip-searched and subjected to increasing levels of humiliation. It makes for an extremely uncomfortable and alarming dissection of people's natural subservience to authority. Played tensely and naturalistically it is disturbingly plausible. The seeds of fascism are but a phone call away.

Apparently a long-cherished labour of love from comedian Will Ferrell, Casa De Mi Padre, in retrospect, seems an obvious thing to do. With the Hispanic population of America on a continual rise and a significant number of the country now Spanish speakers, Ferrell has made a film in Spanish, a very funny deadpan parody of modern Mexican drug westerns, complete with phony sets, an on-screen apology from the second assistant director and Gael Garcia Bernal hamming it up as the drug kingpin Ferrell must battle to save the family ranch. A bizarre experiment, clearly destined for cult status.

Sound of My Voice starts arrestingly. A couple are willingly blindfolded and tied up and are taken to an unknown location. They are part of a group meeting a woman, a cult leader who claims to be from the future. Turns out that the pair are film-makers looking to expose the cult, which is paranoid, secretive and possibly, it is hinted, about to commit mass suicide. What follows is a tense drama, very well made, as they are slowly drawn into the mindset of the cult while evidence on either side piles up ambiguously as to whether this woman is real or a dangerous crazy.

Naive Frank is at a crossroads. He dislikes children but his partner is pregnant. Then, hoping to prove his fatherhood potential, he runs off on a canoeing holiday with the 12-year-old nephew he is supposed to be babysitting and a sex-mad friend, Casper. (Leads Frank Hvam and Casper Christensen are well-known comedians in Europe.) This is Klown, a Danish comedy combining bad taste and gross-out American humour with a deadpan Scandinavian sensibility. It takes a while to get used to but one in the groove it's very funny, even if the lurches between sweet and wildly inappropriate suggest distinctly different cultural sensibilities.