The Tattooist

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The Tattooist trundles its way through a gleefully blood-drenched tale of possessed tattooing tools, an itinerant American interloper with his eye on young Mia Blake, and a series of skin-art commissions that come to life and cause no end of trouble for their unfortunate wearers.

So far, so bleedin' average: from that synopsis you might think there's nothing about The Tattooist that the makers of The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water and especially Tetsuo couldn't have seen coming a mile off, and probably wrung more frights per minute out of than Peter Burger and his crew have managed here.

And you'd be right. On the surface The Tattooist is nothing to write home about. The story is pretty average.

Lead actor Jason Behr – the one whose involvement was enough to get the producer's chequebooks out – is no more than just another North American pretty boy trying to parlay a career on the telly into big screen stardom, and some of the dialogue – "That was the day I left home ... I've never been back since" – is more suited to a comic book speech bubble than it is to a movie allegedly made for grown-ups.

And yet, within all this vaguely disappointing source material, you'll still find some remarkable stuff: The ceremony to celebrate the completion of the pe'a (Samoan tatau), the church services, the lifting of a curse from one family's house; all of these scenes are perfectly executed, and hint at a far better film than this.

Add in some truly excellent performances – Blake, Robbie Magasiva, Dave Fane, Aleni Tufuga, John Bach and Nathaniel Lees each bring wondrous work to The Tattooist – while director of photography Leon Narbey, who also shot No.2 and Whale Rider, makes this film glow as if these characters were lit from within.

Somewhere inside The Tattooist there is a very good film trying to get out: It's set within and around the South Auckland Samoan community, it has unique, original and entertaining things to say about Pacific people's experience of living in New Zealand, and it is the film that I genuinely believe Burger wanted to make.

Unfortunately, that film has been compromised – or perhaps the word is "colonised" – by the expectations of commercial cinema; and so The Tattooist gets lumped with an unnecessary Palagi leading man, the obligatory and distasteful sex scene, and all the other tired and increasingly irrelevant conventions of Westernised film-making.

Personally, I reckon that down here in the Shaky Isles, we can do better than that. If I have to summarise The Tattooist, I'll say that it is a competent horror movie hanging off the bones of what might have been a really extraordinary New Zealand film.