Michael Mathews, “Apocalypse Now Now” (2017)
Made as a proof-of-concept film on which a television series or a feature film will be based, “Apocalypse Now Now” posits a future dystopian South Africa where supernatural cyber-monsters roam through abandoned cities full of giant heaps of technological junk and people live huddled and frightened lives in slums dominated by fundamentalist Christianity. In this milieu travel two unlikely partners: Baxter Zevcenko (Gavion Dowd), a cynical teenager who may or may not be a serial killer and who is on the run from police for supposedly killing his girlfriend Esme, whom he is searching for; and Dr Ronin (Louw Venter), a bounty hunter of supernatural monsters. In this short film, Dr Ronin uses Baxter as bait to lure a giant lumbering aardvark beastie laden with discarded machine trash into a trap. Dr Ronin’s ruse is briefly interrupted by a crazed woman keen on avenging the death of a loved one and whose encounter with the monster results in a fair amount of tomato ketchup being splashed about.
The characters look good: Baxter resembles a chubby and smug upper-class Harry Potter figure, and he may have a touch of the sociopath about him; Dr Ronin seems a bit undeveloped and his mannerisms derived from a motley collection of characters ranging from Captain Jack Sparrow (of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series) to Doc Sportello of the film “Inherent Vice”. The relationship between the two could be more combative and for the time being in this short film, the actors appear to be relying on stereotypes of upper-class, know-all schoolboy brat and doped-out hippie shaman investigator.
The environment in which the two unlikely buddies travel around in is very well realised: the giant praying mantis blends in with the post-apocalyptic / post-industrial dystopia, superstition born of local African and apocalyptic Protestant Christian traditions oppresses communities, and the weird monsters inhabiting the landscape straddle two worlds of dystopian science fiction and a fantasy fusion of two very different cultures that are hostile to each other.
I can see a television mini-series being made out of this film but I am not sure that it can sustain a television series over several seasons unless the scriptwriters are prepared to add more quirky characters and the main characters themselves are allowed to develop in ways that take them far from what they are in the short film.