The Devil Dared Me To (Stapp/Heath, 2007) is streaming on Prime Video
A frustrating morning for me as my intention was to do an ‘on this day’ post but my first four choices are either only available as digital rentals – and not my preferred local option of AroVision – or not available digitally in Aotearoa at all.
Another sign that this digital utopia we are now living in makes it easy to find something to watch but more difficult than ever to find the actual thing you want to watch.
That’s not to dismiss Chris Stapp and Matt Heath’s bogus Kiwi stuntman classic The Devil Dared Me To, but I was hoping for something … classier.
In October 2007, I wrote this:
I fully intended to bring some intellectual acuity back to film commentary this week; maybe toss around terms like Mise-en-scène and cognitive dissonance; maybe name drop Bresson and his thematic austerity and formal rigour. Then I saw little Kiwi battler, The Devil Dared Me To, a hand-made low-brow entertainment from the vodka and Becks-fuelled imaginations of Back of the Y’s Chris Stapp and Matt Heath, and I realised that high-falutin’ cinema theory was destined for the back burner for another week.
Stapp plays wannabe stunt hero Randy Cam
pbell and Heath is his malevolent mentor Dick Johansonson. The Timaru Hellriders are about to collapse under the weight of invidious OSH attention and Dick’s lost nerve. Oily promoter Sheldon Snake (Dominic Bowden) bails them out so they can take on the North Island and get Campbell closer to his dream of being the first man to jump Cook Strait in a rocket car. Wildly uneven but often very, very, funny The Devil Dared Me To contains possibly the worst acting (and worst spelling) of any recent New Zealand film.It’s entirely appropriate that The Devil has come out while we are celebrating the 30th anniversary of Roger Donaldson’s Sleeping Dogs; another back yard, oily rag feature with a similar larrikin approach towards the production process.
The Devil Dared Me To is streaming on Prime Video in Aotearoa and Australia and something called Fubo in the USA.
Other titles that were released that same week in New Zealand – and therefore reviewed in that column – are Joe Wright’s Atonement (“virtually faultless”), Angelina Jolie in Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart (“assured direction … and good performances”), Jodie Foster going Death Wish in Neil Jordan’s The Brave One (“I really wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt until its absurdity and consistently poor narrative choices overcame my resistance and I simply had to hate it”) and the typically French Conversations with My Gardener.
