A scene from The Devil's Rock. Photo / Supplied
It would be nice not to feel the need to eviscerate yet another New Zealand Film Commission-backed local horror that isn't up to its genre job description.
But in The Devil's Rock, that task has already been done for you. Most of the "cast" have already died through various forms
of disembowelment by the time anything happens - the various corpses' entrails expertly rendered by Weta Workshop and director Paul Campion, a Weta alumni himself. So this is a horror film which looks like a bigger horror movie has already been and gone.
Oh that's right, it's a World War II horror flick, one jumping on the Nazi-occult kubelwagen, which has helped carry everything from Raiders of the Lost Ark, to Hellboy and Captain America.
Except here, the black magic amounts to a red demon (Varela) who's committed unspeakable acts on the German soldiers in some Channel Islands bunkers designated for sabotage by a raiding party of Kiwi commandos - Captain Ben Grogan (Craig Hall) and Sergeant Joseph Tane (Drinkwater) - on the eve of D-Day.
Events transpire that Grogan and surviving German devilologist, Colonel Klaus Meyer (Sutherland), must unite to face their mutual satanic foe (why they don't just leave isn't clear), which is complicated because the chameleonic beastie presents herself sometimes as Grogan's dearly departed wife.
