Source: Radio New Zealand
A New Zealand shoestring budget film that’s got audiences gasping and laughing is touring 21 theatres around the country.
Comedy-horror The Weed Eaters , rated R13, debuted at the NZ International Film Festival last year to high praise, and has gone on to win best feature at SXSW Sydney last year.
The film’s premise is a strain of weed that is turning friends into accidental cannibals. But writer and actor Annabel Kean reassures viewers it’s not the same level of grossness as Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste.
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“But when I said that someone walked out, it was my teenage cousin in Wellington who walked out very early on, because she’s vegetarian and there was a badly cooked chicken on a barbecue in the first sort of 15 minutes…
“It’s so funny. I’m so proud of it. It’s so ridiculous and unpredictable.”
Kean says they had gone into the project about three years ago with low expectations of just giving it a go with a $20,000 budget.
“We had a writing weekend over Easter weekend and got together and wrote down on a big piece of paper everything that we want to see in film…
“I think we were really lucky in our balance of knowledge and naivety going into the shooting because we had experience between us. [Director Callum Devlin] and I had made about 50 music videos.”
The Weed Eaters film starring Finnius Teppett, Annabel Kean, Alice May Connolly, and Samuel Austin.
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Many of the cast and crew had multiple hats on – working behind the screens as well as on screen, she says.
“We were really proud of ourselves, but we didn’t know [it would be successful].
“We weren’t sure that it would even work as a film until we watched it with the Civic crowd, a packed Civic for the New Zealand Film Festival, and people were laughing, people were gasping.”
Kean says she couldn’t believe it when even a Gen Z audience at Indonesia’s Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival was cracking up at the film.
“[Finnius Teppett’s] writing and his joke writing does feel very Kiwi, but it works.”
Alice May Connolly in The Weed Eaters.
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A tongue-in-cheek 1.8m fork is also coming along for photo ops during their theatre tour.
“I suppose that’s why I made that. Took me way too long to make that.
“And we’re going to have some meat raffles at some of the screenings. We’re going to have scream competitions.”
The crew have already start working on a new film, Kean says.
“The idea with the super low budget with The Weed Eaters was kind of to prove that we could do it and we could deliver something worth seeing and show that we worked as a team and that also could do things our own way.
“So the next one, we’re hoping for a bigger budget, and we also really hope to work with the Film Commission.”
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand