Fresh Meat is a New Zealand horror comedy film about a modern-day family of Māori cannibals who are taken hostage by a gang of criminals.
The Film was a Canadian Co-Production that stars Temuera Morrison (The Book of Boba Fett, The Mandalorian, Star Wars) Kate Elliott (Wentworth, Jean) and Hanna Tevita (Terry Teo, Daffodils)
Check out the Trailer Below.
Derek's Recollections:Blood and gore, slasher flicks and horror movies in general are not my cup of tea – I can barely watch trailers for the genre. If you look at my work I’m more of a fuzzy bunny sort of guy. When dealing with violent or graphic content I prefer to imply and leave things to the viewers’ imagination.
Back in 2001 I visited New Zealand on a FAM tour with a dozen or so Canadian Producers. There I met a producer named Dave Gibson – an affable enough gent whose company was doing factual programming as well as television drama at the time. I didn’t really see a fit between our companies. A couple of years later while attending the Atlantic Film festival, I met Donna Malane, a producer from Dave’s company. We chatted – did the old “what have you been up to?” routine – and she told me that they’d had an unexpected success with a film called “The Irrefutable Truth About Demons”. They were looking for a follow-up to it and she asked if I had any scripts in the genre that they might be able to look at. I told her that it really wasn’t a genre I was into and left it at that.
A few weeks later, a prolific screenwriter named Brad Abraham walked into my office with a stack of scripts. A stack of horror and slasher scripts to be specific. One that he’d written with his writing partner, Joe O’Brien, sounded interesting; it was called Hell For Breakfast. They considered it a dark comedy. The basic plot was “Murdering criminals break out of Prison and take the whitest of the “white bread” middle class family hostage – only to discover that that “white bread” family are cannibals. A typical “hunters become the hunted” story.
I forwarded the story to Dave in New Zealand and they were drawn to it. We entered into an agreement with the intent of doing a Canadian/New Zealand Co-production. Brad and Joe did a few re-writes, one of which was to set the film in New Zealand, where we would shoot the film. We kicked it around for a while, but I couldn’t get any of the funding agencies interested in it.
Dave figured that he could get it made strictly out of NZ – but that it was too white. He had the idea to alter the script and make the middle class family Maori instead of white, which I thought was a pretty risqué idea. But he brought on a Maori writer and she rewrote the script and went through several years of re-drafting and refining. Finally after 10 years, multiple rewrites, and a complete rethink of the concept, Dave made got the movie made.
Which is how I ended up with an Exec Producer credit on a movie that I could barely watch the trailer to.
