This is from a column on stuff.co.nz. I quite enjoyed reading it. Joe Bennet is a sometimes TV commentarist and oft Dom Post columnist.

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This film is the most certain winner since Phar Lap, but you wouldn't know it from meeting its director.

"I just enjoyed making it," says Joe Bennett, draping himself over an armchair in the studio at the back of his modest Lyttelton property, "and I hope people enjoy watching it. The critics can go hang."

He smiles confidently, and he can afford to. If the crowds flock as expected, he stands to make millions from this low-budget remake of the 1930s classic The Thing and The Thong.

The plot will be familiar to all. The innocent heroine, dressed in a thong, travels to Quail Island on the trail of the mythical Thing, only for it to prove a lot more than mythical.

The Thong's companion gases the Thing into submission and tows it back to Lyttelton as a public exhibit, but the plan goes horribly wrong.

The key to the film's success lies in the casting.

"To play the Thing, I needed something big, black and aggressive," says Bennett, "something to inspire dread, a haunter of nightmares, the beast in the back of the head that represents all our dark fears of the natural world, something that speaks of the untamed jungle, something to terrify us in the simplest, most atavistic way.

"Baz the Labrador seemed an obvious choice. He's very black and his teeth are very white. I did audition the cat, briefly, but it proved reluctant to take direction."

And how did he make the Thing appear 10 metres tall?

"Nothing to it," says Bennett. "It's amazing what you can do with the zoom button on a Camcorder and a bit of cardboard scenery."

The result is a beast that turns the Quail Island jungle into the Jungian subconscious.

The Thing stalks the terrible, uncharted landscape of the primitive human psyche.

And the battle with the giant spiny anteater? "Pure chance," says Bennett disarmingly.

"While we were shooting some cutaways, Baz wandered off and caught a hedgehog. He then tried to chew it. All I had to do was stick a model of Lyttelton behind him and we were away. I don't think he even noticed. He's a natural.
"Arouse Dad, scare the kids and make Mum weep, and you can sell the cretins anything," says Bennett.

"The hedgehog, incidentally, was returned to the bush unharmed. The scene in which its head is ripped off and its innards splatter the lens was generated by Dave down the road. He's a wizard with Photoshop."

Was it the hedgehog that gave Bennett the idea for the scene in which the stegosaurus eats the Thong's companion?

"It was," admits Bennett. "Everyone knows there is no fossil evidence to suggest that the stegosaurus and the Labrador were coterminous, but hey, this isn't a documentary. We're talking mock- terrifying nonsense here, something to exploit the simplest and most irrational urges of the human species. There's no room for facts.

"Nor is there any room for words like coterminous. Keep it simple, that's always been my motto. Just fear, fighting and sex. It works."

And how. As with the rest of Bennett's oeuvre, the violence is magnificent, almost loving, and the baddies are as obviously bad as smokers. But it's in the love interest that The Thing and The Thong transcends all his previous work, including even the fabulously successful trilogy Bored with All Things.

In Bored, Bennett struggled to make the women convincing, for the simple reason that there were none in the original text. But in this film, the Thong matters every bit as much as the Thing.

"The Thong is the archetype of the girl next door," says Bennett, "so I cast the girl next door. She was cheap and keen and she has a thing for Baz which I think comes across in the movie."

It does, so much so that I challenge any viewer not to weep at the climactic scene. The Thing has climbed to the roof of Lyttelton's iconic Timeball Station with the Thong in his paw. And just when the worst possible ending seems inevitable, the Thing looks down at the terrified Thong and is smitten. The Thing goes soft. It falls in love.

"It transmogrifies on the instant," explains Bennett, "from giant, black ogre to paradoxically alluring bad-boy lover. The Thing becomes the chest-thumping alpha- male, the protective hairy father- figure that every woman craves.

"Forget your metrosexuals, your sensitive new-agers, your house- husbands and empathisers. Here is manhood in the raw. Every female heart will melt. Women aren't as complex as they like to make out."

When I suggest that some critics might find the film a little dumb, Bennett just laughs. "'Course it's dumb. It's a dumb industry. If I'd made it all cerebral, using words like transmogrifies or paradoxical, what do you think would have happened? Precisely. No queues at the theatres, and more importantly no merchandising."

He throws open a cupboard in his studio and out tumbles a cascade of cuddly Things, vibrating Things, blow-up Thongs, blood- drenched video games, "I slept with The Thing and The Thong" bumper stickers and movie-tie-in special- edition chocolate bars.

"Arouse Dad, scare the kids and make Mum weep, and you can sell the cretins anything," says Bennett.

"You don't shift stuff like this by aiming high."