DEATHGASM

New Zealand, 2015, 86 minutes, Colour.
Milo Cawthorne, James Blake, Kimberly Crossman, Sam Berkely, Daniel Creswell.
Directed by Jason Lei Howden.

This is a New Zealand entry, with government money backing, into the small-budget blood and gore horror stakes. It is designed especially for the kind of characters who appear in the story, their age, sensitivities and sensibilities, love of heavy metal music and curiosity about horror. It is the kind of film that plays in specialised horror festivals.

Those interested in the impact of the film, checking with the Internet Movie Database reveals how much the fans enjoyed the show.

The director has had a career in New Zealand with special visual effects for a great range of films, especially several Hollywood blockbusters (The Avengers, Prometheus, Wolverine, the Hobbit films), and draws on this expertise in creating all kinds of horror atmospheres, bloodied creatures, gory interludes.

This film is not something new for New Zealand – the director has worked with Peter Jackson and their references to his earliest horror films like Brain Dead.

The film is set in a small New Zealand town, Greypoint (and there is a Greymouth on the South Island), and a nerdish teenager who has had difficulties with his parents is taken in by his uncle and aunt and aggressive cousin. The cousin is a bit of a hero at the local school and the archetypal blonde is his girlfriend. Brodie, the nerdish young man, helps another student who is being bullied and joins up with him and his friend to form a band at. A chance meeting at a record shop introduces him to Zakk also becomes part of the band.

There is something of a subplot about mysterious pages of music which are being held by an older musician and a visit, Brodie and Zakk taking the record and music – but he is killed by a very well-dressed assassin on behalf of a man who claims to have diabolical power and who then executes the assassin. He will appear later on confronting the supernatural powers which appear claiming to be the one to receive these powers – only for his being stabbed by his female underling.

In playing the music, all kinds of dire and drastic things occur in the town, people being transformed into zombielike creatures, a great deal of blood, a great deal of spewing of blood, confrontations and brutal deaths.

In the meantime, Brodie is attracted towards the blonde student, she to him but he is betrayed by a bored Zakk which turns Brodie against his friend – who is much more involved in the supernatural happenings than was expected.

Young audiences who relish a lot of tongue-in-cheek horror where the film makers don’t want to exercise much control, indulging their imaginations and their emotions, will probably like this one a lot.