Today the best girlfriend ever and myself went to see the long expected Perfect Creature, a movie that was filmed in Oamaru, Dunedin and Auckland back in 2004 and after post production waited for a general release until this week. While I tried to keep up to date with the movie’s problems, I never quite understood why it took so long for the movie to be picked up by a distributor. Apparently directly to DVD in the U.S., this is now out in Europe and Australasia.

Being interested in the work of director Glen Standring and curious about the scenes filmed in the victorian quarter in Oamaru, I really had no choice but to see it. We saw the flick on a nice big screen in Dunedin’s Hoyt’s cinema on a saturday morning. Not the perfect time to see a movie, but a mercifully quiet cinema without annoying teens, mobile phones going off and people crunching chips behind me.

The movie looks stunning: with a comparatively tiny budget, Standring made good use of computer generated imagery but it blended in beautifully in with the ‘real life’ shots. Colourwise, the movie is a masterpiece: in tune with the bleak and unwelcoming world it portrays, the colours feel sucked out, and greys and earth tones dominate. A mainly Kiwi cast apart from leads Dougray Scott and Saffron Burrows does a good job and did I mention the visuals? The art directors and production designers Ivey, Basset and Bavin deserve an Oscar for creating a coherent and plausible steampunk world, that combines technology from the fifties with the interior design of the twenties and a streetlook of the victorian age. Very, very impressive.

So, it looks great, but is it actually a good movie?

The best girlfriend, who normally doesn’t like watch Horror/Fantasy/SciFi at all and who only tagged along to see Oamaru on the big screen, was certainly impressed. I was completely blown away by the richness of Standring’s alternative universe and the story kept me at the edge of my seat until the very end. Burrows and Scott can be proud of their achievements and Standring should become a giant of his genre.

Go and watch it.