Jackson's Action: Reasons to watch and not to watch Heavenly Creatures

Peter Jackson's early (1994) film Heavenly Creatures is maybe worth watching to get a sense of how much energy the later-famous Jackson could bring to this sordid materials - movie based on the true crime case from NZ in 1954 in which two teenage girls carry out gruesome plan to kill the mother of one of the girls. Jackson is far less interested in the crime itself, and not at all interested in the investigation, conviction, life up to the present - his entire focus is on the girls: who are they?, what could drive two ordinary schoolgirls of different backgrounds (one the child of working-class parents who run a boarding house, the other the child of a college dean) to plan, execute, and actually document such a crime (one of the girls kept a detailed diary, which forms the spine of the story and which led to their quick arrest and conviction). Jackson tells the story with a lot of odd camera angles - note the weirdly titled sequence showing one of the girls, Pauline, sitting in bed and writing in her diary - some crazy montages, especially when Pauline has sex for the first time, with one of the boarders, and some utterly bizarre sequences in which the girls' fantasy figures - various singers and movie stars - come "alive" as life-sized claymation like objects, dancing with the girls and singing. (They're fantasy world built around dolls and action figures may remind some of the fascinating documentary Marwencol.) The movie introduces Kate Winslet, who's really good in a demanding role, physically, emotionally, and sexually. You might catch the then-unknown Jackson himself in a cameo as a disheveled street person. Ultimately, however, despite all the flare and flash, the movie's a bore - after a teaser of an opening sequence with the 2 girls running bloody through the woods - we wait a long, long time for anything to happen; Jackson spends for ever establishing the weirdness of the two girls and the horror of Winslet's family - and we keep wondering, OK, so what's next, why am I actually interested in this - if in fact I am.