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The film leans more silly than scary. It gallops up the absurdity curve as the characters try and fail to deal with this crisis, the strong temptation of the “cannibal weed”, and then each other’s treachery.
A very New Zealand horror film
The Weed Eaters
We have a group of naïve young city dwellers coming unstuck out in the country, going places they shouldn’t, struggling to cope without resources and encountering horrific consequences. The locals seem threatening, and the setting full of dread.
This draws from the New Zealand gothic , in which an environment that seems peaceful and pastoral – here, the bucolic farms and alpine foothills of North Canterbury, shot in the buttery light of the golden hour – masks hidden trauma and nasty secrets.
This all builds cleverly upon New Zealand’s long history of producing horror comedies, right back to Peter Jackson’s early films Bad Taste (1987) and Braindead (1992). Indeed, up until recently – with the release of Gothic horrors like Mārama The Rule of Jenny Pen (2024) and Went Up the Hill (2024) – Kiwi horror has been best known for its emphasis on gallows humour, deadpan comedy, body horror and “splatstick”: a combination of gross-out splatter with slapstick comedy.
Director Callum Devlin expands on these traditions, positing that for millennials, social awkwardness, adult ineptitude and a fear of the future are their own forms of horror.
This film asks which is worse – serving up bits of your dead AirBnB host with cheese and crackers, or getting stuck with your partner’s weird mates in a poorly furnished, isolated getaway with bad cell reception and no plumbing? Accidentally maiming each other, or being too stoned to manage an interaction with the cashier at the petrol station (comedian David Correos, hilarious even while playing it straight)?
The inept characters all seem to be performing adulthood while giving into their worst adolescent impulses. Any time they have a decision to make, they take the worst of the options.
The film’s race to the bottom is excruciating, and very funny. It’s also well-paced. One of the pitfalls of stoner comedy is that it can drag (no pun intended). Here, the film’s slippery sense of time and the characters’ dulled responses only add to the sense of paranoia, mistrust and tension as things slide out of control.
Alice May Connolly in The Weed Eaters.
Supplied
A vibrant, low-budget picture
In New Zealand, there have long been concerns about the functionality of the traditional pipeline from talent development through to feature production and post-production, which can also pit individual creatives against onerous funding processes, in a challenging employment environment.
Instead, Weed Eaters was made as a collective, with the director and four performers creating the story together, and each taking on various creative and production roles. Between them, this team have years’ worth of experience in making music videos and web series, writing for theatre and film, on and off-screen performance, filmmaking and broadcasting.
Production company Sports Team – Annabel Kean and Callum Devlin – have also achieved success in the 48Hours film competition, a national talent incubator .
The miniscule budget included NZ$19,000 worth of crowdfunding. The shoot location was rural property owned by the Kean family.
Some elements of the film lack polish, but it feels vibrant rather than shoddy. Performances are loose and naturalistic, entirely committed to the bit. Everything is beautifully shot, including a nightmarish bender lit by camera flashes. The sound mix is terrific. Callum Passells’ raucous, jangly score is inspired, and augmented cleverly with songs from notable New Zealand musicians, including Paul Kean’s The Bats.
The script could have done with further development, as in the way earlier scenes such the group’s stoned New Year’s resolutions relate to the rest of the film. Still, these issues don’t lessen the film’s comic impact, particularly in a crowd.
The Weed Eaters is an assured piece of filmmaking that knows what it is trying to achieve. It shows what creatives can do if they are given some resources and just left to it.
It’s a worthy entry into New Zealand’s distinct class of comic horror and a masterclass in oily-rag dirtbag filmmaking – even if it might put you off chutney for a while.
Erin Harrington is a Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies, University of Canterbury.
