Insert
your own family dinner joke here. Or don’t
bother. New Zealander Danny Mulheron’s
fearless cannibal comedy will make them all for us. Questions of good taste will entirely depend
on the viewer’s palate when Fresh Meat (trailer here) screens as a Midnight selection of the
2013 Tribeca Film Festival.
Rina
Crane is a very proper young Maori lady who has come home from boarding
school. She is thinking it is about time
to drop the lesbian bomb with her family, but they beat her to the punch,
revealing the new family diet. In hopes
of finally achieving tenure, her academic father Hemi Crane has revived an
ancient mystical cannibal cult. Eating
will flesh will give them supernatural powers or so the theory goes. His new faith is about to be put to the test
when a reckless gang of fugitives invades the Crane home.
For
the freaked out Rina, this sudden turn of events is not all bad, largely because
of Gigi, the ringleader’s less than enthusiastic girlfriend. She happens to bear a strong resemblance to
the fetish superhero character Rina created as a focus for her fantasies. Clearly, the two share an instant attraction,
at a time when Rina’s family loyalties are somewhat fraying.
Basically,
Fresh combines elements of Desperate Hours with We Are What We Are, adding all kinds of
politically incorrect humor. At one
point Hemi Crane declares: “we are not Maori cannibals, we are cannibals who
happen to be Maori.” Whew, feel better
everybody? The treatment of Lesbian
themes is about as sensitive, with scenes clearly included for maximum leer
value. Oh right, there’s plenty of gore
too.
You
have to give Briar Grace-Smith’s screenplay credit for jumping on every third
rail it could find. Likewise, Temuera
Morrison embraces the gleeful mayhem wholeheartedly as Hemi Crane. As Rina, Hanna Tevita keeps her head above
water amid all the bedlam, even conveying a measure of sensitive teen alienation.
