All comments by Johnny Moronic

Had a request to do some New Zealand movies and here's a couple from the 70s/80s. Was able to find the Bluray of Sleeping Dogs, so no problems with the quality there but Pallet On The Floor is incredibly obscure but it turned up on Tubi which a whole bunch of New Zealand movies from the 80s have. But it's basically a low quality DVD, so it's better than VHS but not by much. It's fine but during any fast moving scenes, it struggles but I guess it's the best that we'll get unless this almost forgotten movie gets remastered.

Sleeping Dogs

1977, 1080hd

Sleeping Dogs is a 1977 thriller where during an uprising against the government, Smith (Sam Neill) up and leaves his family for some solitude on a remote island. After a massacre orchestrated by the Prime Minister and his head of police, New Zealand turns fascist, not that Smith cares until he asks to by a gun from a local, only for things to get weird and the special police ending up on the island to arrest him. Turns out he's been framed up and he is told to confess on live TV and he'll be given asylum overseas but on the way to the TV studio, Smith escapes. He ends up in Rotorua hiding out a motel which is then overrun by American soldiers led by Colonel Willoughby (Warren Oates) who use it as a base. Meanwhile, Smith's past catches up with him when Bullen (Ian Mune), who shacked up with Smith's wife Gloria (Nevan Rowe) arrives having joined the resistance and wants Smith to help him in an ambush of the American soldiers. Smith is having nothing of it as he never wanted anything to do with the revolution and hates Bullen but when the woman that help him find refuge is found dead, Smith reluctantly helps and the soldiers are massacred by the Bullen-led revolutionaries. Smith goes back on the run with Bullen and even spends time with Gloria before they go back to where Smith was to join forces with a group of revolutionaries but by this time, Smith is the most wanted man in the country and everyone is after him. Very good thriller about a man forced kicking and screaming into something he wanted nothing to do with only for it to define him. Sam Neill's and director Roger Donaldson's first film and both show a lot of talent, particularly Neill, who's effortlessly a leading man even this early in his career. Some of the plot is a bit hokey but the conspiracy angle is laid on thick and is absorbing for the most part, even when it settles down for a long stretch climbing a mountain towards the end of the movie. A pretty solid early New Zealand movie, some say the first New Zealand movie ever made but I think there was at least one made in the 1940s.

Donna Akersten film clip (sample below)

Pallet on the Floor

1984

Pallet On The Floor is a 1984 crime drama where local factory worker Sam (Peter McCauley) gets married to a Maori woman (Jillian O'Brien), who is pregnant with his child, much to the chagrin of her former lover Jack (John Bach) who harrasses her at the wedding. Also at the wedding are Sam's best pals Basil (Bruce Spence) and O'Keefe (Terence Cooper) but O'Keefe has a seizure at the wedding and dies. After a night at the pub, Sam is convinced by the local bartender Miriam (Shirley Gruar) who has a thing for him that the baby isn't his. Sam and Sue get into an argument but make up the next morning. The next night things get tense as Miriam makes a drunken move on Sam and Jack comes to Sue who is all alone at home and attempts to rape her but she escapes to the street just as Basil and friends are walking past and in the ensuing brawl, Jack is killed. Basil, Sam and co. attempt to cover up what happened instead of calling the police about an accidental death of a wannabe rapist and it goes badly, discovered by a local cop who tells them to take the so-called drunk Jack to hospital with him driving behind them. But instead they go ahead with their plan to drive his car onto the train tracks for a train to hit it, which it does. Problem solved, well of course not. Word is spread fast that Jack was murdered and local head cop Larkman (Tony Barry) is on Sam and Cecil's back looking to take them down. But what happens next is not forseen by anyone. OK low key crime drama that probably would've played better as a black comedy because it teeters on the edge of being one for the longest time without ever becoming one. Particularly after Jack is killed and the farcical proceedings in the cover up of the death but it's played straight down the line the entire time. And it's full of that bleakness that can only come from New Zealand.

Jillian O'Brien film clip (samples below)