Betaville

A data entry worker,

a secret agent,

and New Years Ever 2999

“Check out this low buget sci-fi-cum-action movie” - NZ Herald

“I see it and I'm knocked out by the quality, shrewd depiction of Auckland as a futuristic metropolis, the awareness of the movie's antecedents and the just-right length.”
- moviexpress

Betaville was the first digital feature film to be shot in New Zealand (however since the project took two years to edit it was not the first completed).

The total  cost of Betaville was less than $NZ 1,000, an amount that would not even cover a single lunch for a Hollywood style crew.  The big advantage of working with a ridiculously tiny self-financed budget is that you are not beholding to anyone to produce a  finished product of a certain style or length. At 65 minutes Betavilleis as long as it needs to be and no longer.

Betaville was shot in the winter of 1997, and the editing and music was finally completed in August 1999.

One of the most distinctive features of Betaville is the mixture of live action with computer generated animation, and cartoon like action, complete with speech bubbles.

Everything Explodes

Betaville is a sort of parallel universe to Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Alphaville’, and also borrows extensively from Hong Kong and B action movies such as ‘Enter the Dragon.’ and ‘Our Man Flint.’ The plot is basically the same in hundreds of 70s action films - protagonist arrives in foreign place, meets beautiful girl, fights cruel villain, escapes with girl, everything explodes.

Synopsis
Secret Agent Lemmy Caution arrives in Betaville with a mission to abduct the Scientist-dictator Von Braun. To gain access to Von Braun he is to manipulate Von Braun’s beautiful daughter, Natasha. Scientists always have beautiful daughters. Of course Lemmy falls in love with Natasha. Given that Von Braun is (naturally) a Kung Fu expert the rest of the plot should be obvious.

At the end everything explodes (of course).

All materials © 2006 Phil Davison
All rights reserved.