New Zealand. 2012.
Crew
Director – Danny Mulheron, Screenplay – Briar Grace-Smith, Story – Brad Abraham & Joseph O’Brien, Producer – Dave Gibson, Photography – Simon Baumfield, Music – Plan 9 (David Donaldson, Steve Roche & Janet Roddick), Visual Effects Supervisor – John Strang, Visual Effects – Dusk, Special Effects Supervisor – Sven Harens, Production Design – Kevin Leonard-Jones. Production Company – Gibson Group/New Zealand Film Commission.
Cast
Temuera Morrison (Dr Hemi Crane), Hanna Tevita (Rina Crane), Kate Elliott (Gigi), Nicola Kawana (Margaret Crane), Kahn West (Glenn), Leand Macadaan (Ritchie Tan), Jack Shadbolt (Johnny), Ralph Hilaga (Paulie Tan), Will Robertson (Shaun Armstrong), James Ashcroft (Police Inspector Jimmy Katene), Richard Knowles (Officer Lance Nisbet), Andrew Foster (Officer Richard Gallup)
Plot
Rina, the teenage daughter of associate anthropology professor Hemi Crane and his wife Margaret, a celebrity tv chef, returns home from boarding school. She is shocked to find a human hand in the fridge. Her brother Glenn calmly explains that the family have turned to cannibalism. Hemi has become a devotee of the Solomonites, the 19th Century pre-colonial Maori cannibal cult led by Solomon Smith. At the same time, jailed killer Ritchie Tan is broken out during a prison transfer by his brother Paulie and girlfriend Gigi. While in the midst of police pursuit, they crash into the Cranes’ garage. They take the Cranes hostage but have reckoned without Hemi’s devoted cannibal ways and Rina discovering a sudden lesbian attraction to Gigi.
Danny Mulheron is a multi-talented New Zealander. First appearing as an actor back in the 1970s, Mulheron began also working as a director and writer on assorted New Zealand tv comedies throughout the 1990s, while co-writing and performing in Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles (1990). His major success during this period was the tv comedy series Seven Periods for Mr Gormsby (2005-6). Mulheron made his directorial debut with the film Rage (2011) set during the Springbok Protests of the 1980s and has done other assorted tv directing work. Fresh Meat was the second film he has directed to date.
New Zealand is an odd country filmwise. It has no commercial filmmaking industry such as studios, just minor production companies. Everything else is handled by government subsidy whose executives have the say over which films get funding. There is no real incentive for films to make or break themselves at the box-office and so what we end up with is the odd mix of indie films of significant cultural value and B budget efforts that are all over the radar. (See New Zealand Cinema).
Fresh Meat is one of these head-scratchers. If it was American-made, it would have a B-budget and probably be released by Troma. It is certainly a cleaned-up Troma film in its aesthetic. And yet in New Zealand it is made with a decent budget to it and cast with one of the country’s top actors, the award-winning Temuera Morrison.
With Fresh Meat, Danny Mulheron seems to be heading into a very un-PC area – the film is about Maori cannibals and contains a few racial jibes that people may be a little more cautious about making today in the 2020s. Equally, the film features a lesbian love at the centre of it, which the film eventually decides is the most normal thing worth fighting for. In the 2020s, the heroine deciding she is gay and walking off with a woman would be commonplace. On the other hand, it leaves you wondering whether Mulheron’s inclusion of such was less about diversity and more gratuitously intended as with the brief inclusion of the erotic tease of a girl-on-girl shower scene near the start. Certainly, the film does follow modern trends in that we are told three times within the first ten minutes of meeting her that Hanna Tevita is into girls as though the issue of inclusivity needed to be underlined in bold so that nobody missed it.
Danny Mulheron goes for a frequent bizarreness factor – like the scene of Hanna Tevita in bra and a piupiu (Maori grass skirt) doing a poi dance for Ritchie (Leand Macadaan) who sits on watching while dressed in her bra and panties. Throughout, Mulheron adopts an affected comic-book style with a love of cartoon violence – the inept attempts to hijack the prison transfer van and especially the slow-motion fight with police officer Richard Knowles in the kitchen.
Kiwi humour is never something known for its subtlety or finesse of timing. In the film, Danny Mulheron aims a very broad vein of humour that often hits you over the head just to make sure you got the joke. You wanted Fresh Meat to hit the inspired heights of Peter Jackson around the time of Bad Taste (1988), Meet the Feebles and Braindead (1992) but instead what we end with is more down around the broad Kiwi farce of a film like Came a Hot Friday (1985). Unlike Jackson’s films, there is no visual punchline, no cartoonish surrealism, just the feeling that you should be laughing because everything is given such a broad playing.
One of the best finds of Fresh Meat is Hanna Tevita (who nowadays has retired from acting and is a lawyer in Wellington) who gets the innocence just right. The scene of almost seduction with her getting Kate Elliott to clean her off is perfect, while she nails the moral outrage at discovering what her parents have done very nicely.
Trailer here