John Bach

Horror · Mystery

A pregnant woman returns to her recently-deceased grandparents’ old family home to spend time with her estranged mother. What begins as a tenuous reunion slowly turns terrifying.

Thriller · Action

When a young female scientist discovers that the pharmaceutical company she works for had developed a cure for cancer years earlier, she attempts to release it to the world. Knowing that they make more money from chemotherapy drugs than the cure, the company does everything it can to stop her.

Adventure · Comedy

Gerry hires a car in Kaitaia with a stolen licence and travels to Invercargill with John, whose wife has just left him. The ultimate New Zealand road trip adventure.

Drama · War

On an obscure Pacific Island just north of Australia, the Japanese Empire has operated a prisoner of war camp for Australian soldiers. At the close of World War II, the liberated POWs tell a gruesome tale of mass executions of over eight hundred persons as well as torture style killings of downed Australian airmen. In an attempt to bring those responsible to justice, the Australian Army establishes a War Crimes Tribunal to pass judgement on the Japanese men and officers who ran the Ambon camp. In an added twist, a high ranking Japanese admiral is implicated, and politics become involoved with justice as American authorities in Japan lobby for the Admiral's release. Written by Anthony Hughes

Thriller · Drama

During World War 2, a farmer in New Zealand murders seven people. The police, along with local Maori trackers, hunt him in the bush country.

Adventure · Comedy

When young Brian discovers plans to close a convent of delightfully eccentric nuns, he sets off with them on a wild road trip across New Zealand to save their home.

Drama · Crime

In 1943, U.S. marines are stationed near Wellington. One of them is murdered by the boss of the Hotel Workers Union, who is sitting pretty, exempt from military service and living it up on black market profits. Girls under the control of the union - of whom the victim's fiancee, Rose, is one - give sexual favours to the Americans, in return for information. The marine assigned to investigate the murder, tries to find Rose through a public health nurse who traces VD infections. However they discover there it more going on than they realized, involving a conspiracy amongst the Union, the government and the U.S. military.

Drama · Action

Based on a true story, The Heroes follows one of the most extraordinary and heroic exploits of World War II. After months of rigorous training in the north of Australia, a team of 14 men, most barely out of their teens, set sail from Cairns on board a leaky old fishing boat called 'The Krait'. Their mission, code-named Operation Jaywick, became a tense voyage through thousands of kilometres of Japanese held territory to launch a daring attack on Singapore Harbour. The raid is a success but within sight of safety they encounter a Japanese destroyer, and all prepare to die rather than be taken prisoner.

Adventure · Horror

Anthropologist Max Scarry mysteriously disappears while doing excavation/research of a lost New Zealand tribe on a remote island. His wife and his twin brother Edward are clueless as to what could have happened, a situation complicated by their city's police suspecting that one of the brothers murdered a local prostitute who was found with a strange tribal charm on her body matching one found in Max's abandoned hut. What most certainly isn't helping matters is the strange behavior of Max's daughter as she seems to have visions beyond possibility, warnings of a supernatural threat and her uncle's fate - and she's the film's narrator, to boot. Edward decides to go to the island to find out exactly what happened, but the deeper he goes into the mystery the more perilous and unknowable his world becomes, leading towards a shocking fate that raises more questions than it answers. (cont. http://view-from-the-paperhouse.blogspot.de/2014/10/the-threat-of-ancient-echoes-lost-tribe.html)

Drama

Chilling story of a farmhand who realizes his popular boss has been committing incest with his daughter for years.

Drama · Sci-Fi

An unlikely outlaw wreaks hell across the dusty dystopia of The State on a wild quest to save what is held most dear, but things aren’t always what they seem on the desolate wasteland frontier.

Thriller · Mystery

A young woman investigates the death of her mother, who drowned when her daughter was still a baby. The question is: was it murder, suicide or merely an accident?

Drama

A Polynesian street-kid and a much older middle-class housewife are both incarcerated in the same mental hospital - she for attempted suicide and he for habitual crime. A friendship grows between them such that she offers him a place to stay upon his release. However, difficulties arise with his continued criminal activities and dependence on her for support - then his gang moves in with them. The film is based upon Sue McCauley's award winning autobiographical novel.

Drama · Crime

A docu-drama covering one of the most famous cases in New Zealand history, the murder of Harvey and Jeanette Crewe in 1970.

Action · Crime

High court judge Holly McPhee devises blueprints for criminal operations and offers them for sale to the crime world. Her scrupulous operation falls apart when she takes part in a multi-million dollar bank robbery and becomes an accessory to murder.

Comedy · Crime

A murderous black comedy set in the 1960s. Sam (McCauley) and his small band of hard-drinking and eccentric friends are having a night of it when a drunk truck driver, Jack (Bach), attacks Sam's Maori wife Sue (O'Brien). In the struggle, Sam and friends end up killing Jack. None of them regrets this, but it has been observed by Miriam (Gruar) who decides to blackmail Sam. Jack's brother Joe (Napier) comes looking for revenge and ends up being killed by Basil (Spence). Their jobs at the freezer works are terminated, and Basil has his own idea about how to get out of their troubles.

History · Drama

True story of Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone, inspired by his mother.

Comedy

Former Welsh rugby hero Bleddyn Morgan has his life in New Zealand interrupted by a deathbed confession that leads to a replay of a controversial 1966 All Blacks/Wales rugby match - with the original teams. The now old men pull on their jerseys one more time while Morgan deals with his past on his return home.

Comedy · Drama

Two brothers take their father into the city for the weekend for a rugby game and a night on the town. However, the old man dies in their hotel and the boys need to smuggle his body back to their farm and make it appear that he died there to satisfy a clause in his will or else they won't inherit the property.

Drama · Western

The Man from Snowy River is an Australian television series based on Banjo Paterson's poem "The Man from Snowy River". Released in Australia as Banjo Paterson's The Man from Snowy River, the series was subsequently released in both the United States and the United Kingdom as Snowy River: The McGregor Saga. The television series has no relationship to the 1982 film The Man from Snowy River or the 1988 sequel The Man from Snowy River II. Instead, the series follows the adventures of Matt McGregor, a successful squatter, and his family. Matt is the hero immortalized in Banjo Paterson's poem "The Man from Snowy River", and the series is set 25 years after his famous ride.

Drama · Comedy

Rebecca Gibney and Charles Edwards star as two city slickers who inherit a failing vineyard in rural New Zealand.. the only problems are that neither of them has ever done a hard days' work- and they despise one another.

Drama

This Is Not My Life is a 2010 New Zealand television mystery thriller which originally aired on Television New Zealand's TV ONE channel on Thursday nights. Set in the 2020s, the show centres on Alec Ross who awakes one morning to find that he doesn't know who or where he is and doesn't recognise his wife or children. The story is set in the fictional town of Waimoana. The series is written by Rachel Lang and Gavin Strawhan and directed by Robert Sarkies and Peter Salmon. Thirteen episodes have been produced. Though the show only lasted one season, it has been announced American network ABC has purchased the series to adapt for an American audience.

Drama · Action & Adventure

Mysterious Island is a Canadian television series based on Jules Verne's novel L'Île mystérieuse. It ran for one season in 1995. The beginning of the series is much as in the novel. A group of refugees attempting to escape the American Civil War in a balloon wind up stranded on a remote Pacific island, where they are able to improvise a comfortable living for themselves while they wait for a passing ship. As time passes, they become suspicious that some unseen force is watching and directing their movements. The main difference between the protagonists of the series and those of the novel is the addition of a female character, the wife of Pencroft. The unseen watcher, Captain Nemo, is more active and less benevolent than in the novel. Able to monitor the island through steampunk-style closed-circuit television and other advanced devices, he treats the castaways as human laboratory specimens, influencing their environment to test their behaviour under stressful conditions. As the series progresses, his tests become more extreme as their continued co-operation threatens his preferred thesis that all humans are, at base, selfish and untrustworthy. In the series finale, Nemo apparently succeeds in breaking up the group; this proves to be a ruse by the protagonists, who are now certain of Nemo's existence. After they penetrate his hideaway, Nemo admits that the 'experiment' is ruined, and offers to return the castaways to civilisation in his submarine. In a final twist, he puts out to sea without them, apparently leaving them alone on the island, without his influence for good or ill.

Drama

On January 18th, 1977, a crowded commuter train heading for Sydney, came off the track and struck the pillars of an overhead road bridge, crushing part of the train and killing 83 passengers and injuring more than 200 others. This story follows the coronial inquiry into the crash with flash-backs to the main story, and the efforts of the rescuers to free the injured victims.

Action & Adventure · Drama

15-year-old Davie Balfour is poised to receive a vast inheritance when he's lured onto a cargo ship, knocked unconscious, and kidnapped by his malevolent uncle Ebenezer, who devises a scheme to sell him into slavery. But Davie's unforeseen rescue at the hands of a Scottish rogue, Alan Breck, with them racing across the Scottish moors, with English bounty hunters in hot pursuit.

Crime · Drama

On 21st April 1976, gunmen held up more than 50 members of Melbourne’s venerable Victorian club, escaping with several million dollars in untraceable cash. The robbery had been so brilliantly planned and executed that police were left without a single clue–and so strict was the robbers’ code of silence that not even the underworld was aware of their identities.

Drama · War & Politics

Heroes II: the Return is a 1991 Australian mini-series about Operation Rimau during World War II. The true and tragic story of Operation Rimau, one of the most daring raids of WW2. In September 1944 Ivan Lyon and 22 Australian and British troops attempted to blow up Japanese ships in Singapore. Just 10 miles away from the target they are discovered and so begin a long and desperate bid to escape to Australia. The series shows how after the war it is revealled that 13 men were killed during the pursuit and that the remaining 10 were murdered by the Japanese in a war crime. Tragically this was covered up and their killers were never charged while the men themselves never received any honours for their heroism.

Drama

Golden Fiddles is a 1994 Australian mini series based on the novel by Mary Grant Bruce. It was sot from 23 July to 16 September 1991 and was re-edited into a TV movie in 1994.

Drama

The Paper Man is a 1990 mini series about a fictitious media mogul.