Perfect Creature

Relevant offers

Perfect Creature is a fairly high-minded vampire flick set fair and square in the middle of an alternative vision of our own New Zealand past.

This mid-budget horror outing takes a goodly handful of steam punk staples – copper bottomed computer screens, fleets of ornately decorated dirigibles, vaguely 1930ish cars with clouds of vapour belching from their cowlings – and places them against the stone buildings of Oamaru and Dunedin to really ravishing effect.

In fact, it's not exaggerating to say that the production design and cinematography – from the brilliant Leon Narbey – combine to make Perfect Creature one of the best looking movies to have come out of Aotearoa since The Lord of the Rings finally wound up.

So, Perfect Creature looks a million bucks. It's just everything else about the film that's the problem. Director Glenn Standring doesn't seem to realise that no matter how many beautiful props and moodily lit exchanges he puts up on the screen, no one sober or over the age of about 16 is going to take a vampire movie particularly seriously.

The story – a blood-sucking serial killer threatens to shatter the peace between mankind and the vampires – really is too daft to stand up to much scrutiny, but scrutinise is all that Perfect Creature seems to do.

Even with Saffron Burrows and Dougray Scott to play with, and able contributions from local lads Scott Wills, Stephen Ure and Robbie Magasiva – any one of whom are capable of blowing the roof off a movie – Perfect Creature never finds any real storytelling momentum.

Better written vampire flicks than this one have still found the time to be fun.

- © Fairfax NZ News