“Crime has a new bedtime”
STAND BY ME meets SAW in this horrific Aotearoa-set tale of youth, injustice and ultra-violence.
Inspired by their comic book hero, JUDGE JUSTICE, ten-year-old Fred and his friends get even with school bullies, parents, teachers, shopkeepers, bus drivers and “injustice” wherever they see it.
But what starts as a youthful exercise in setting things straight quickly spirals out of control with ever more bloody and gruesome results. Focusing on a core cast of multicultural kids (Fred, Wiremu, Chan-Lee, Ruby and Eve), and shot entirely in New Zealand, JUDGE FRED is told from the point of view of Fred and his friends, much as E.T. was seen via Elliot’s eyes. The colours are bright and happy. The kids to the fore and the adults in the background. It’d be an ideal family movie - if it weren’t for the escalating violence and gratuitous gore.
Written and directed by former ITV Television UK Workshop Leader and South Seas Film School Director, Adam Fresco, shot by Adrian Frencken, with cinematography mentored by legendary DoP James Bartle (of KIWI classics THE QUIET EARTH and DEATH WARMED UP), the DramaTrain NZ production team behind the short film GRACE return with a bloody horror splatterfest in the tradition of BRAINDEAD. Real in-camera effects shot in glorious colour, with animated flights of fancy courtesy of The NZ Animation College and an original orchestral score by Sandy Lynch, combine to create an original vision in horror, that’s part THE GOONIES by way of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, part BATTLE ROYALE by way of LORD OF THE FLIES - and all terror.
JUDGE FRED – Judge. Jury. Executioner.
Kiwi Valley Primary School Pupil of the Week.