Great moments in NZ cinema #6: Taking the car to Invercargill

It's all been fun and games in Goodbye Pork Pie, with the epic journey from one end of the country to the other in a yellow mini. There have been some outrageous car stunts, cops being made to look like idiots, and some extreme living off the grid, with the crew even setting up a deeply cosy and very temporary home in a container on a train.

But the further south they go, the darker is gets. They lose Shirl in Christchurch, and Dunedin should be a haven, but they only find harmful weirdos. And on the last stretch into Invercargill, the movie is in a grimmer place, that determination to get down there getting a little too brutal, a little too painful, especially when Blondini comes a cropper.

All that is left is the dead straight lines through the Southland countryside, the grey flat expanse at the end of the rainbow. They'll be lucky to get to Invercargill alive.

Great moments in NZ cinema #5: Michael Heseltine, if you're wondering, is a British politician from the 1980s

Ant Timpson also had an obvious eye for the incredibly strange, so it's no wonder Come To Daddy is a particularly bizarre movie experience. Frankly, it's more shocking how unexpectedly sweet natured his second effort Bookworm is.

And even if you've picked the big twist of what is really under the floorboards at Elijah Wood's father's place, there is no way anybody would predict the Michael Heseltine line at  the end. It almost makes sense in the context of the scene, but I just really, really like the way Michael Smiley's accent wraps itself around that surname, and the way I did not see that coming. 

Great moments in NZ cinema #4: Land of the long white bullshit

It's not long into Loren Taylor's The Moon Is Upside Down before Victoria Haralabidou's Natalia realises that her new life in New Zealand is not what she hoped for. The cafe she is supposed to be managing is a dingy service station on a dead road, and she goes out to take in the scenery, and it's just flat, dull farmland in every direction, very fucking far from Middle-Earth.

It's little surprise when she soon finds out that there are ulterior motives behind the purely transactional matrimonial deal that got her into the country, and she has to make some big and terrible decisions, but there really is some dark humour in the way her new husband and his awful sister, played by the legendary Robyn Malcolm, truly don't understand why Natalia isn't impressed by life on the flat farm.

What do you mean you don't like it? You don't know how lucky you are. Eat more butter.

Great moments in NZ cinema #3: Bruno made it all look good

We have all had the fantasies about what we would do if everybody else in the world disappeared. We know what fancy house we'd go live in, what beloved shop we would start looting for the finest things in life. 

But without any human company, we would also probably go crazy quite quickly, and Bruno Lawrence's low, slow descent into deep melancholia - which takes up the first third of The Quiet Earth -feels particularly true. 

Lawrence was the most unlikely movie star, with his greasy baldness and sunken, sallow features. But he also had magnificently deep eyes, inexhaustible charms and some outstanding acting skills (see also Smash Palace, his laugh as the train goes by at the end is immortal).  

He soon sorts himself out in The Quiet Earth and gets on with things, but his ability to carry off the dress and shotgun look remains an iconic fashion statement. 

Great moments in NZ cinema #2: Crayfish again?

If you're not in the right mood for them, Taika Waititi's films can feel smug and twee, but the more personal he gets, the better his movies are, and Boy is the most Taika of all.

My name was on the back of the DVD when it came out, and I stand by my assertion that you'd have to be an egg to dismiss it. It's wickedly funny, and the part where the kids moan about having crayfish again, when other parts of the country would pay a hefty sum to tear into their own seafood is absolutely rad.

The kid who paints himself blue to look like a smurf is a universal thing, though. We all knew somebody like that growing up.

Great moments in NZ cinema #1: Get stuffed, fascist

Smith never wanted to be a revolutionary. He just wanted to be left alone, and at the start of Roger Donaldson's Sleeping Dogs he literally wants to go off and live on an island on his own after a messy break-up. But he gets dragged into the fight against a very homegrown fascism and sees a lot of people brutally die for no good reason.

And by the end of the film, adapted from the equally bleak Smith's Dream by the acidic C K Stead, and all the death and cruelty he has seen, he has had enough, and walks off, giving the finger to the man as he wanders away away from the brutal scum. He knows they are just going to kill him and he just does not give a stuff anymore.

He's immediately gunned down, of course. But he was doomed from the start, and at least he went out on his own terms. They never broke the man who just wanted to be left the hell alone.  

Middenface McNulty by Carlos Ezquerra: The big licks is comin' wi' him

Strontium Dog by Carlos Ezquerra: No surrender!

Strontium Dog by Carlos Ezquerra: Save it, scum