Ghost Bride, made by New Zealander David Blyth, is an apt Halloween night selection.
The new movie by the man who made what is generally regarded as this country's first horror film is an apt Halloween night selection for the opening of the inaugural Asia Pacific Film Festival in Auckland tonight.
Ghost Bride is the work of David Blyth, whose wildly uneven splatter film,
Death Warmed Up, made waves in the local industry 30 years ago, three years before Peter Jackson made Bad Taste.
It was nothing compared with Blythe's 1978 feature debut, Angel Mine, a surrealistic satire of suburban complacency (a drug-crazed leather-clad couple plan to kill the first family they find with an empty fridge).
The film, which earned the puzzling censor's warning "contains punk cult material", was described by moral watchdog Patricia Bartlett as "diabolical, crude, coarse and revolting" - an accurate summary of its appeal.
Positively mild-mannered by comparison, Ghost Bride springs from a well-known Chinese tradition (it even has its own Wikipedia page) of a marriage in which one or both parties are dead. The underlying idea is explained by one character in the finished film: "It's a curse for a woman to be unmarried at death; her ghost wanders, searching for a partner." More evocatively, it quotes a 16th-century Chinese poem as an epigraph: "For love, the living can die; for love, the dead can revive."
