Rick’s Reel Recommendations | A Druggy Double-Billing

RICK'S REEL RECOMMENDATIONS | ISSUE THREE | WHENUA

Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickthelai & Letterboxd | Film Columnist

1. I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (Caveh Zahedi, 1994)

A warning: mileage may vary for this road trip documentary. Caveh Zahedi is perhaps the documentarian most committed to self-sabotage since the time Morgan Spurlock ate 270 Big Macs to conceal his alcoholism in Supersize Me. Zahedi, an impolite, offhanded nebbish who is openly manipulative, is as hard to watch as he is impossible not to watch. Perhaps it’s his slightly clueless affect that tempers that rudeness. I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, which is free to watch on YouTube, is an interesting early-career prototype of the daily vlogs that now occupy the site. Ostensibly trying to ‘prove the existence of God’, Zahedi takes his emotionally detached father and his short-tempered sixteen-year-old brother on a roadie to Las Vegas, hoping that by letting the camera roll, he may capture something beautiful. A roadblock becomes blatantly clear, however: they all hate each other. (‘Nothing that I’ve wanted to happen has happened the way that I’ve wanted it.’) The prospect of spiritual discovery is complicated even further when Zahedi, a seasoned drug-tripper, finds ecstasy pills in a hotel bin and coerces his family into consuming them together. The resulting squabble, which occupies over a third of the movie, is excruciatingly painful to watch. Frankly, it seems that Zahedi has worsened what was already a fraught bond with his kin. And then, in nigh Biblical fashion, a miracle arrives. The editors happily roll with any technical flubs along the way, including a reel with missing sound and accidentally double-exposing the film. Anxiously staining the come-up of the trip are remnants of a previous scene. In a world of camera buffs willing to clutch their cards close to their chest, Zahedi simply lets his fall as they may. The jury’s still out on whether this repentance brings him anywhere close to heaven, but nailing all of his failures up for scrutiny is at least a strong start.

1. The Weed Eaters (Callum Devlin, 2025)

Seasoned fiends for the trash movie will be schooled up on the so-awful-it’s-amazing propaganda film Reefer Madness (1935). An all-American PSA about how smoking marijuana will turn your children into handsy, gun-toting, suicidal, commie-siding damsels. Ninety years later, two couples somewhere out in the middle of Canterbury have wandered ass-backwards into a cannabis-clouded cautionary tale of their own. The Weed Eaters centres on the quartet’s holiday in a southern farmhouse, who,  while half-bored and high, rummage through the property and discover a dusty jar containing a bright-purple something. Even a newbie to the doobie would identify the whiff: it’s weed. Pandora’s Box be damned; they don’t yet know that this bud-strain gives the smoker an insatiable craving for human flesh. The ensuing disaster makes for the funniest (and grossest) comedy about stoner paranoia since Smiley Face (2007), and given that stoner movies are either Seth Rogen hangouts or Evil Bong (2006), The Weed Eaters provides a refreshing counterpoint to what is typically a ruckus for frat-bros. For my money, this movie nails the feeling of slipping out of your own presence in the middle of a sentence. It's clearly written and performed by seasoned smokers with their share of good and bad experiences seshing. The two women in the lead, Alice May Connolly and Annabel Kean, especially throw themselves into the mayhem with physical gusto. Particularly in a scene at a gas station, which demonstrates that the hardest part of being high is pretending not to be. An earnest love for pulpy horror leads naturally towards a homage to the Wellingtonian cult classic Braindead (1992); a death-by-line-trimmer so nasty it’d probably make Peter Jackson remember that he used to make movies. The Weed Eaters, the debut feature film from filmmaking duos Sports Team and Horse Bite, premiered at last year’s NZIFF to raucous laughter, and it releases this April theatrically. I hope you have the munchies for it!