New Zealand doesn’t get nearly enough recognition for their wild plots and equally wild shifts of tone. South Korea is best known for it, but NZ have a wild style all their own. Peter Jackson described his own similar films as ‘Splatstick’ and that applies here too. This one starts with the novel idea of someone under house arrest in a haunted house and just piles on the crazy from there. By the end it doesn’t even seem like the same film I started with, which is something I encourage, but it’s also somewhat too ADD. It’s a film whose strength is in the clever plotting more than a commitment to deepening the characters. And if any of this reminds you of M3GAN and where they ended up taking the sequel, that’s no coincidence. Writer/Director Gerard Johnstone made that first film as a director-for-hire before putting together the genre-switch script for the follow-up.
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