What I liked:
Funny, of course, and a nicely paced political advertisement. Ridiculous imagery and claims. The tossing of the North Island into the sea and resulting realisation of what that might mean for the people living there was a great touch. Nicely filmed, edited and wonderfully myopic.

Take it or leave it:
Piece-to-camera political PSA/mockumentary. Slight eye-roll but it is fun. A one-person on a mission to destroy the North Island may have shown more ambition. I know that’s not what you were going for, but you still have thrown the North Island into the sea!

Final hot air:
Fun and quirky as normal from Toot Toot. Love ya mahi!

Reading through these reviews, I'm reminded of Sherlock Holmes, the fictional legend who rebelled against his creator, for he could not be bound by the chains of death. Just as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tried for eight long years to hold his creation within the grave, but ultimately failed, one can't help but wonder if the legendary Larvae Girl is destined for resurrection by the baying of her loyal 48Hours fans.

It's impressive how much Herms Heroes (from the creators of Hindsight Productions) can cram into a five-minute film. So much action. So much drama. So much spectacle. So much colour. So much ethereal aura. So many characters and locations. So much cringing at gore and broken bones. Too much purity. Just enough haunting opera. And almost enough pretty hand-drawn animations that embody Larvae Girl's true superpower: retro analogue vibes.

My favourite line of the competition this year is "Revenge me!" because of course Tony Chestnut isn't educated enough to swap out the noun for the verb, and of course I'm enough of a snob to mock him for his dying words. But what a delight it was to see our beloved Tony on the big screen, and what a shock to see him shot so soon!

48Hours is getting so meta and I love it. So many in-jokes. I'm 200% behind you Larvae Girl. It isn't self-indulgent to serve your community!

This film (or a prototype) could have benefited from a bit of what we in the survey industry call cognitive testing. In other industries it's called user experience testing. And in the film industry it's called a test audience. Anyway, the point I'm trying to get to with all this wankery is… I'm not very observant and so I didn't scratch my sniff card when I was meant to. When Tony Chestnut was wafting doughnuts and colas under his nose, I was thinking "Hmm, this would be a good time to have the audience scratch their sniff cards, but I can't see any numbers on the screen so I'm going to stubbornly keep watching the action." Minutes later, when I finally saw a number at the bottom-left of the screen, I thought "Hmm, unusual choice not to start the counting at 1." Towards the end, when 2 appeared for what I thought was the first time, I thought "These numbers are all over the place!" And when the film ended, I thought "Weird, I never got to scratch number 1." So for dolts in the audience like me, the number needed to be bigger, flashier, animated, in the middle of the screen, or accompanied by a narrator yelling out the number with the hyper-masculine hyper-American energy of a WWE commentator.

I leave it with you, oh mighty Herms Heroes, to decide whether to heed Conan Doyle's advice: "my literary energies should not be directed too much into one channel" and "If I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would at the present moment be a more commanding one."

Long may flashy camp crowd-pleasing 48Hours films continue!

What I liked:
Great setup, and overall the film gave me some “Chicken” by Nuggets from 2024 vibes. The initial attacks in the house are brutal. Loved the “It was just a joke” line – heard this so many times! Also loved the silliness of the 8-bit game sequence, but also so very glad that you didn’t stay with this, because the rest of the outside fighting is so good. Well shot, okay sound, and there’s some effective editing. It’s lots of fun and OTT.

Take it or leave it:
The head slam on the table was one thing, but the slapping of the sister was something else altogether and may turn some people off. Sometimes, and inconsistently, this competition can be more conservative than you may think. I loved it as it immediately raised the stakes massively and even made me gasp! Smartly, you then transitioned to the video game scene, which may have softened the blow for some. A work-on is your sound, which played a bit variable, and you could have gone harder with some of the sound FX.

Final hot air:
I really enjoyed this (one of my 2026 favs), and I think you were unlucky not to make the shortlist. Great stuff!

Mon Amour unfolds at a nice pace, steadily revealing the key characters and plot details. Suddenly, everyone is assembled for the will reading. Nicely executed! It must have taken quite some writing and rehearsal to pull it all off. Well done for roping in that many actors and successfully directing them all.

We suddenly hear muffled piano when we enter the house. It suddenly gets louder when the lounge door is opened, and louder again when we enter the lounge. This is a really nice touch.

We witness the witty spats of a family of brats. There are some great jokes, puns, and flauntings of wealth and ingratitude.

I find myself wondering, since Jayden gets a 20% share in Theodore Windsor's prized yacht, who gets the other 80%? I can't help but briefly notice the cinematographer's reflection in the window of a kitchen cupboard.

One-shot is a tricky genre, but gives a pleasing result as we weave in and out of the interactions of lots of different characters. It reminds me of live theatre I saw at Riccarton House where the audience could move between the rooms at will to take in different parallel scenes – but of course this is quicker and more controlled.

Great marrying of house, script, and characters in this film!

Nice name for the film, and nice idea to have some shock factor upon the reveal of the "painting" – though the sketch felt maybe too ludicrous. I wonder if the shock factor could have been heightened by having a real painting that was nevertheless incriminating in some way, or just really terrible.

Throughout the film, conversations about the painting got lost in the busy dialogue. It would have been nice to see more purposeful foreshadowing of the painting so that we the audience were on the edge of our seats to see it. It would also have been nice for the relationship between Katerina Jones and Theodore Windsor to be built up over the course of the film, rather than revealed suddenly in a line of dialogue immediately before the painting was revealed. Perhaps then we could have inferred more about whether Katerina was Theodore's true amour, whether in death he did something deliberately to hurt her, and why.

I enjoyed this film and the eclectic nature of the one-take genre. Well done!

A cool concept. Great performances. Great art direction. A nice pace. Nice lighting. Great use of the portrait for foreshadowing and for building a sinister feeling.

I enjoy the use of sound effects and sparse dialogue to imply a story that we don't see. The "tenant" concept is a little confusing but I think I get the idea. Certainly the sparse sinister elements in this film paint a clear picture in my mind of what is going on, which is exceptionally good storytelling and film-making (regardless of whether my interpretation is "correct").

At times the camera focus isn't as seamless and smooth as one might hope, which highlights the immense challenge of the one-take genre.

I reckon the sound mix needs some attention, as some of the dialogue is too quiet compared with the sound effects. The rumble in particular is exceptionally loud when played through a subwoofer.

I enjoyed this film and I'm looking forward to seeing more from you, Little Frog Studio!

Such a good film! Great concept and really well executed. The performances are on point and perfectly kiwi.

A more light-hearted take on the culty themes that I raised in my own film, and which come up often in 48Hours. But this really turned the idea of cults on its head. Usually they're big on recruiting. This one absolutely isn't recruiting, making it so ludicrous that the cult even exists and has members. Usually they're so earnest on their beliefs, yet this cult leader will disavow them just to get the potential new recruit off his back. Usually they're a crock of shit, yet this cult turns out to be right on the money. I will admit though, it feels quite culty to target such arbitrary parts of modern culture as lululemon and matcha and blame them on the Government.

I love seeing how passionate the recruit is about every grizzly task assigned to him. The bootlicking gets a visceral reaction of disgust from the audience. Hey, I'm into it!

What I liked: Crazy switching of tones and characters seemingly uninvolved that did, in fact, hint at the plot. Liked the close-ups – some of which were really well executed. Games were fun too. End scene was well acted and had some good make-up. Also stoked to see some of my ex-students were involved in this – Will & Dinah (LHS represent!)

Take it or leave it:
The quick whip pans were hard to watch – unsettling, sure – but shouldn’t make one feel nauseous. While I liked the games, that took up a lot of time, and the real horror we didn’t really get to until much later. It was a good twist though. Probably a bit more horror than comedy, but I’m sure that some people were laughing throughout.

Final hot air:
A good short with some definite strong points. Well done!

What I liked:
Character intros of the team were fun. The desktop background has a lot of interesting icons – “2026 Kill List”, “Taylor Swift dates”, “Cats-movie” and a million “New Folder(#)”. Adrian’s puppet meeting was a nice touch of humour too. Some nice work with shadows in parts and good close-ups on certain things/people.

Take it or leave it:
Logging in and waving at the screen took a long time (and I get the joke) – but it is time that could have been better spent elsewhere in the film. The team didn’t really do anything either – the Hacker, sure, the Brawn sure, and then everyone just ran away. If you’re going to put a team together, they need to do more than just look at a computer screen!

Final hot air:
As others have said, more of the start of something bigger. Why not continue it next year?!

First off - banger of a team intro. I’d love a tutorial on how you got those amazing CRT graphics sometime.

Secondly, I was beside myself that I couldn’t attend the Wednesday heat to smell this film. Therefore, my review will be covering merely two of the three senses offered by this cinematic delight.

Opening up with a glorious haze of halation I can’t help but imagine a chip commercial on Days of our Lives. It’s a dreamy world we’re in and surely nothing could destroy the tranquility of this moment for the audience. Larvae Girl has found her one and only and that’s all I need.

But this moment of bliss is soon interrupted by one of the most lo-fi gunshot sounds still on the internet (was it recorded in an elevator shaft?) and delivered at a level Nolan himself would be proud of. Tony is dead and the film begins in earnest. Larvae Girl pleads to an omnipotent presence (a canny foreshadowing perhaps?), questioning “why does this keep happening to me?” - a hilarious line and pitch-perfect performance from Rata.

What follows is an absolutely beautiful cut montage (guided by a man inexplicably from Boston?) that serves as a kind of retrospective trailer, catching us up on what we may have missed in previous films. It serves this film particularly well to give an emotional heartbeat to an otherwise absolutely ridiculous story. The montage ends with another murder and day-glo blood splatter. The film begins in earnest.

I absolutely love how balls-to-the-wall is in everything that follows. It’s the most maximalist approach to film making I’ve seen in this competition. Never too many crash zooms. The fact that you made a stuffed mannequin body to dump off the fine arts’ air bridge, only to show it for *checks notes* 1 second is so unbelievably commendable.

More crash zooms! Blood spatter on the lens - either achieved digitally or with some perspex held in front - is just another fleeting example of the wonderful attention to detail here.

The action is interrupted by a memory sequence of Tony offering up a delicious muffin. This is clearly less about driving the plot forward and more of a nod to the audience, that had Tony not died from a gunshot, cholesterol would have gotten him eventually. Larvae Girl smiles and we know all is well. Side note - these scenes really remind me of the Chubbs dream sequences in Happy Gilmore.

As Larvae Girl removes the antagonist’s eye, we return once more to Tony who exclaims he “loves a popped corn” - In my humble opinion this was a missed opportunity to say “popped cornea" - but too late now.

“My booooones, you’re breaking my boons” will almost certainly win best line delivery.

Tony likes cheese. Good lord, what did Larvae Girl ever see in this feeble glutton?

Herms Heroes, like so many teams this year decide to preempt their rumour with “I’ve heard a rumour” just incase the audience need some handholding. I’ll allow it. It’s followed by a spectacular whip pan/match cut which is my favourite moment in an already spectacular edit (one that will surely take out the editing award).

Larvae Girl confronts Judgey McJudge Face, who is also of some unspecified North American descent, and has me questioning where in fact this world is set. Has there been a plague of US criminals upon Christchurch? Or has she been in The States all this time? It’s a delicious mystery. Tony would relish its deliciousness.

One final fight, some inspired scratch animation, and Larvae Girl is dead. Never a team to be overly sentimental, we learn this is fact by an on-screen caption. She’s gone to heaven, meeting the very omnipotent presence she pleaded with earlier. Much like Tony’s doughnut, Larva’s girl’s story has come full circle.

I have nothing more to add. It’s a masterwork. Can’t wait to see, and finally smell, this on the big screen.