Out of the Blue

Absolutely awful. I tend to just star my reviews than write something, but was compelled to pass on my advice not to watch this!

Before watching this and I had never about this tragedy before, but this was similar and remind me of the events of the sad and awful Hungerford and Dunblane. Typical of Aussie and Kiwi films/documentaries on real crime.

What if something you did innocently as a 9 year old resulted in the deaths of your father, 11 year old sister and 11 others in your neighbourhood, and to this day remains the worst mass murder in New Zealand's history. How would you feel? - pretty awful, I'd guess, and that's a major understatement. So how would you feel if, 16 years later, this horror was brought back into the limelight again with the release of a feature film portraying the event? I, for one, would find it disgusting, unnecessary & in very bad taste, yet that is exactly what we have here.

This film recreates the terrible events of that fateful day in 1990 when David Gray, out of the blue, starts shooting everyone in sight. He suddenly snaps when 9 year old Chiquita Holden runs across his land to her father. He shouts at her & when her father intervenes he fetches an automatic rifle & starts shooting. The father is killed and Chiquita is wounded but manages to escape; so begins the *assacre (sic) [my local council censors the m word on its libraries' computers as it is too 'violent' - nanny state or what?]. If only Chiquita Holden hadn't run across his land - if only.....

Just what the point of this film is I don't know - it certainly can't be entertainment because viewers know it really happened. To put it into context, would we in the UK want to see a movie about the Soham murders & watch an actor playing Ian Huntley murdering those 2 little girls? I don't think so. As for the actors they are all unknowns except for Karl (Pathfinder) Urban. Matt Sunderland, in a thankless role as David Gray, plays his part without histrionics. Georgia Fabish as Chiquita may have a good future as an adult actress.

I imagine the real Chiquita Holden must cringe whenever this is aired on NZ television and it's her I feel sorry for. If ever a 'true story' should not have been filmed, this is it.

Format: DVD

This was a dramatic and watchable portrayal of a killer at work who appeared to be a loner in a strange isolated community of caravan dwellers in New Zealand. It was a true story and not overplayed so far as I could tell. However, it lacked a certain clarity. It was never made clear in the film itself just who had died or the actual sequence of their deaths so elements of the film lacked clarity, a sign of careless production. But an interesting account nonetheless.

This film could have been made much more dramatically with some big stars and it would have been totally destroyed.

The magic of this film was that the actors really and truly looked like you would expect a bunch of small-town New Zealanders to look.

I would have started it by proclaiming that this was a True Story because my wife and I were a bit puzzled at first as everything just appeared normal, as it would be. Then the villain starts his rant and the pace starts to pick up. Eventually the pace reaches fever pitch and people are dropping like flies.

What made the guy do it? I don't know and probably nobody evr will.

A salutory lesson in making gun control tighter.