How would you like to be shipped to a leper colony? Does it matter why? I’m not sure. The girls here made the mistake of being teens, which never goes well with movie nuns. I have no idea if it goes well with real life nuns, but my grade school experiences tell me the answer is “no.”
The scene is New Zealand, somewhere in the 20th century after WWI, but before people decided that sending kids to the Alcatraz of boarding schools wasn’t cool. Now, while there are no lepers any longer living in this leper colony, you still can’t get around the part where girls were disciplined through means that would be considered “cruel and unusual” punishment in legal situations.
Heck, if the place weren’t so damn stiff, you could probably hear Donna Summer singing “Bad Girls” in the background of every scene. So on the premise of culturing the uncultured, this Catholic New Zealand school has sent a dozen or so girls and three nuns to go live on an abandoned island that -I have stated above multiple times- used to be a leper colony. The place is a shambles. The huts are cold and leaky, and it’s not quite clear what the girls are supposed to be learning other than, of course, that the head nun is a Nazi.
Our heroines here are Nellie (Erana James) and Daisy (Manaia Hall), a somewhat mismatched pair united seemingly only by their hatr
ed of the milieu. What is more fun, studying a very conservative version of the bible as a path to, I dunno, a future nunnery … or plotting escape from this teenage Papillon?
At first I thought we were gonna get a poor woman’s Dead Poets Society, but We Were Dangerous turned out to be more of poor woman’s Shawshank Redemption. – and a very poor woman at that. I enjoyed to ideas of rebellion a lot more than the execution of rebellion in this film. Sure, every Nazi nun deserves a good come-uppance, but I felt very short-changed on that end. A 1980s American version of this material would have been superior because it almost certainly would have let us rally around the girls more and made their jailor suffer. That’s saying something, as I’m never going to advocate the 1980s American version of almost anything else.
Reform school or colony, penal?
Accusing co-eds habitually venal
While belligerence is my jam
There’s too much of “yes, ma’am”
And very little stimulation adrenal
Not Rated, 83 Minutes
Director: Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu
Writer: Maddie Dai, Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu
Genre: Li’l Shawshank
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Belligerent coeds
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Nuns
