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Review: Predicament, The White Ribbon & Piranha 3D

By Cinema, Reviews

The unhappy bard of Hawera, Ronald Hugh Morrieson, died in the sure and cer­tain know­ledge of his own fail­ure. Only one of his four nov­els had been pub­lished (and only in Australia) and the oth­ers lan­guished in obscur­ity. He wasn’t to know that his Taranaki-gothic vis­ions would prove per­fectly adapt­able to the big screen and that no less a Hollywood legend than John Carradine would appear in the first of them, The Scarecrow in 1982. Came a Hot Friday (1985) fol­lowed to huge box office suc­cess but then the Morrieson curse struck again and, due to the vagar­ies of the inter­na­tion­al movie busi­ness, Pallet on the Floor wouldn’t even make it in to cinemas in New Zealand.

Predicament posterHis oth­er nov­el, “Predicament”, has finally made it to the big screen and, I’m sorry to report, that Morrieson him­self might prefer that it hadn’t. It’s Hawera, 1933. A socially repressed New Zealand small town, pleas­ant and pla­cid on the sur­face but teem­ing with petty crims and sly-groggers under­neath. When gawky teen­ager Cedric Williamson’s moth­er died his fath­er (Tim Finn) suffered a break­down and is silently build­ing a huge wooden tower in his front yard.

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