Sydney Film Festival: Day 5

Still no Hugo Weaving, the bastard. I had to settle for gritty Australian convict cannibalism and fake blaxploitation instead.

Van Diemen's Land

Alexander Pierce has influenced a lot of entertainment of late; it's like he's a volcano and it's the mid-nineties. Earlier in the year, ABC screened a factual film, The Confession of Alexander Pearce, and his legend was used as the basis for the awful Dying Breed, where his descendants are the villains. Now Van Diemen's Land shows his story as it played out: a group of eight convicts, upon escaping their penal colony, resort to cannibalism to stave of starvation. If you ever wanted a film that could make cannibalism boring, Van Diemen's Land has granted your wish.

The Sydney Film Festival's organizers have put the film alongside Dead Snow and Paranormal Activity in the horror strand. Their failing here can't be held against the film; that would the same as begrudging Finding Nemo after being told it was a film noir. It's not scary or fast moving, but it's not supposed to be. It's barely even a thriller: it's a drama. While Van Diemen's Land cannot be faulted for being a genre film without tension, it can be faulted for being a drama without tension. We start the film by meeting eight convicts in the mid-1800s in what now is Tasmania. They escape, led by one who doesn't appear to actually know where he is heading. It is out of desperation that the idea of cannibalism is raised.

The production values here are great. It almost does feel as if the filmmakers – it's Jonathan auf der Heide's feature debut – were dropped into the bushland a century and a half ago, and hired local actors. Authenticity is high; everything's dirty and dangerous, and any romanticised ideas of Australian colonial life are thrown out the window. Here, the straightforwardness of the story lets it down. Events simply unfold without any turns. The convicts walk; one is killed and eaten, they walk some more, then another is offed. Ethical questions aren't really raised, although that may have made this film Alive 2: The Convicts, so we can be thankful for that. It would have helped were we given a character to let us into the story. Pearce himself (Oscar Redding, who cowrote the film with auf der Heide), is the closest to a lead character, but no attempts beyond the occasional arty voiceover are made to help us to understand him. Auf der Heide is happy to just show the slow journey and the forces of nature instead.

The problem is the story. "Convicts resort to cannibalism" makes an interesting sentence, but not a two-hour feature, when that's all that happens. In prose form, with access to the inner workings of the convicts, but that lacks here. Despite the impressive production and the fine acting, this film just doesn't grab. It aims for bleak, but hits dreary.

4/10

Since seeing Van Diemen's Land I've come across more positive reviews than negative, and after talking to other festival-goers who have seen it, I seem to be in the minority in my opinion. Turns out I'm an artless pleb.

Black Dynamite

Jive suckers.

Sick of spoofs yet? When those motherfuckers Seltzer and Goldberg churn out a new [Blank] Movie every thirty seconds that lampoon the most fleeting elements of pop culture simply be recreating them; when the Wayans brothers are ripping of those two, who were ripping them off in the first place; when even David Zucker has lost his touch, by celebrating US conservatism and, even worse, not being funny when he does so, we're in trouble. That's what makes Black Dynamite so refreshing: it won't date, as it actually feels like it comes from the period it's spoofing, and belongs to the genre: 70s blaxploitation. The jokes will still work in a decade's time. Also: it's fucking hilarious. That helps things.

The titular Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White, who also cowrote) is a badass former CIA agent from the CIA who sets out to avenge the death of his brother, after promising in adolescence to their dying mother that he'll never let him die. He follows the trail from his local neighbourhood, soon uncovering a nefarious honky plot that leads to China and all the way to Washington. Black Dynamite is a funny character in himself, but at the same time, is a genuine action figure. This helps cement the film in the seventies, as if it were actually made then – and at times it's easy to forget that it wasn't. It does this as well as Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, which takes apart bad 80s television horror, but is even funnier.

There's some slight lag in the middle of the film but laughs still come throughout. The soundtrack, by Adrian Younge, deserves special praise too, not just (as with everything on display) for feeling so period-real, but for being so spot-on funny. Director Scott Sanders has done such good work here, if the film weren't so perfectly contained, I wouldn't complain about him handling a number of sequels chronicling Black Dynamite's further adventures. As it is, the film is destined for cult status. It is deserved.

8/10

I was running out of synonyms for "funny" there. Word suggested "mirthful". Fuck you, Word.

Lessons Learned

• Cannibalism isn't as glamorous as Anthony Hopkins will have you believe.
  
• Cannibalism isn't as funny as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 would have you believe.
  
• People still have to try a lot harder if they want to beat Dying Breed at being the worst thing inspired by Alexander Pearce