The Weed Eaters had its international première at FrightFest 2025, Monday 25th August
A Weed Eater is the name – initially a trademark and then used more generically – of a motorised garden tool used for trimming unwanted grass. In Callum Devlin’s The Weed Eaters, however, the ’weed’ of the title refers to marijuana, and the characters are ‘eaters’ in the sense that those who ingest buds from an ancient jar of the stuff end up with an irresistible hunger for human flesh, via a kind of cannabic cannibalism. Although rest assured, in the end the power tool will also play a significant part.
In a 1982-set prologue, young Neil (Jordan Mooney) and his lover Paula (Ella Gilbert) smoke up some of the weed, and turn hungrily on each other. Exactly 42 years later, Jules (Alice May Connolly) joins her schoolteacher boyfriend Brian (screenwriter Finnius Teppett) for some New Year’s Eve partying with Brian’s sister Charlie (Annabel Kean) and her boyfriend Campbell (Samuel Austin). The place they have rented for the occasion in rural North Canterbury turns out to be a glorified garage with few facilities, and the boys prove less than great at evenly barbecuing the chicken they have brought with them – but once Charlie has broken out her weed and dosed the breakfast pancakes, everyone is stoned to the gills and having a good time.
When Campbell and Brian, in search of a ladder in the shed of neighbouring farmer Neil (Paul Kean), chance upon Neil’s hidden stash of buds, they are soon getting high on this new (old) supply – except that alongside the usual giggling, disinhibition and munchies that come with smoking weed, anthropophagous urgings enter the arena, as well as a paranoia that slowly turns these four hapless revellers against each other and anyone else – like local shopkeeper Darryl (David Correos) – who gets in the way of their debauched bender. It will be a downward spiral of compulsive behaviour and bitter (if sweet-tasting) consequences that they decide might be better devoured than buried.
Before all this, as the four millennials smoke their first joint from Neil’s bad batch, they decide to turn over one new leaf with another by sharing their New Year’s Resolutions. Brian wants to quit teaching, Campbell hopes to get into bouldering, Charlie aims (paradoxically) “to not make any more decisions about anything – just path of least resistance”, and Jules, already struggling under the effects of the drug to articulate herself, just hopes “for next year to be really – really – funny”. In weird ways, all of these dreams and aspirations (apart from old Neil’s one “not to cark it”) will be fulfilled over the course of the film, and Jules in particular will see her vaguest of desires vividly realised by all the serial stoner comedy of errors that ensues, made somehow even funnier by the increasing levels of bloody overindulgence and carnivorous consumption.
Made for peanuts by a small, devoted cast who also all served as crew, Devlin’s film is as laid back as it is low budget. In theme it falls somewhere between John Ainslie’s Do Not Disturb (2022) and Ariel Vida’s Trim Season (2023), while bringing a self-deprecatory Kiwi humour that is all its own. Here the demon weed may create as many new problems as it solves old ones, and it is hard to know what the following day or indeed year will bring for anyone who has survived this hungry, hard-binging blowout – but then, it may well be another 42 years before the comedown (and maybe comeuppance) arrive.
strap: In Callum Devlin’s stoner comedy horror, four millennials see in the New Year with very old dope and murderous munchies
© Anton Bitel
