Get this. A medieval mining community in Cumbria is threatened by the Black Death but a local youngster reckons that they can be saved by a pilgrimage to the other side of the world, Amazingly he seems to be on to something after he and his chums stumble across a magic drilling machine and emerge via the sewers into an antipodean city circa 1988.
“It’s must be god’s city - there’s so much light”-exclaim the gob-struck troglodytes. After close calls with trains on the track, subs in the sea and trucks on the tarmac (plus, of course, a reference to the AIDS plague). They climb a church steeple, whence one of them falls to his death.
Confronted by the film’s gothic pomposity by it’s internal inconsistencies, and by performances in the style called Theatrical Ensemble (where thesps run around over-acting in gangs), you may choose not to care about any of this. On the other hand, you may decide that the real moral is that there’s no end to the gullibility of the government appointed film-funding boards, as the Film Commissions of both Australia and New Zealand inexplicably played midwife to this unmitigated guff.