With The Devil’s Rock, Wellingtonian Paul Campion has created an effective slice of pulp cinema, perfectly pitched to fly off video store shelves around the world. A fiendishly simple idea – Nazi Devil-worshippers – is executed with a panache that belies the tiny (virtually) self-funded shooting budget. Despite being some distance from everyone’s cup of tea, The Devil’s Rock knows its intended audience and shouldn’t disappoint them.
Just before D‑Day in 1944 a pair of NZ commandos (Craig Hall and Karlos Drinkwater) silently beach themselves on a remote Channel Island. Their mission is to disable the German guns, and fool the enemy into thinking the Allied attack will be more than 150 km further west than the real plans to land at Normandy. As they make their way inside the spooky fortifications an unholy scream from the depths below raises the hair on the back of their necks and introduces them to a terror more … terrifying than anything in their original mission.
To really understand a country you have to go and live there – embed yourself with the people, soak up the culture. If you don’t have the time or inclination for that then the next best thing to is to get stuck in to their commercial cinema. Not the stuff that makes it into major international film festivals like Berlin and Venice, not the stuff that gets nominated for foreign language Academy Awards, but the films that are made to excite and please a local audience. That’s what festivals like