Razorback and the gonzo mania of Australian horror movies

90-something minutes of a movie you can smell

I don’t particularly care for what they’re calling eco-horror these days. Movies about nature on the offensive, animals, either normal-sized or giant, they just don’t move me. Hollywood has been making movies of this type since the 1930’s and for my money, Stephen Spielberg dropped the definitive picture in 1975, just about the only one worth your time: Jaws. Jaws made $475m in its day. Adjusted for inflation, that’s equivalent to a little more than $2.5b. Naturally, everyone with the means to make a movie wanted in on the cut and what followed was dozens of “when animals attack” movies. Most of them are trash. The vast majority stayed the course and kept it in the water but a few of them tried to do something at least a little bit different and subjected dozens of victims to attacks by bears, dogs, and alligators and, like the ones that terrorized audiences with movies about the ocean, most of them were garbage. But I’m willing to let a few pass and one of the eco-horror movies that I proudly claim as a truly engaging phenomenon is also one of the weirdest I’ve ever seen: Russell Mulcahy’s unhinged feral pig nightmare, Razorback.

Razorback is a thousand Australian movies happening at the same time, all of them vying for your attention, none of them playing nicely with the others. It’s wild. Mulcahy previously directed some of the most noteworthy music videos of the 1980’s, titles that you are definitely familiar with if you’re over a certain age. Razorback represented his first foray into the world of features and for all the complaining I’ve done over the years of short-form directors making the leap to features and falling short, Mulcahy not only sticks the landing but manages to keep a foot in both worlds like a natural and the resulting masterful mixture of approaches coalesce into a truly unique horror movie.

If you’ve never seen the documentary, Not Quite Hollywood, stop what you’re doing right now and check it out. You’ll be glad that you did. It’s a document of the Australian exploitation movie industry that popped in the 1970’s following the easing of moral restrictions in Australian film at the time and the culture of wonderful trash that emerged. What was drifting to American shores as distinctly Australian film at the time were these high-brow works of art, cinema fare that is distinctly not a part of the Cinema Suicide milieu. But at the same time, independent studios were looking for cheap crap to stuff the drive ins with and were only more than happy to buy up anything trashy and mean from the same shores that were producing these delightful works of art and Razorback is an actor in that scene. It’s outrageous because while proper film consumers were thrilling wonderful examples of film-as-art like The Getting of Wisdom and Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Australian exploitation industry was hard at work producing as many anti-advertisements for Australia as a travel destination. Even in cosmopolitan Sydney, the movies of the time portrayed Australian society as horny anarchy. At its social fringe were films that you could very easily smell as you watched them. Nothing was more threatening and alien to just about everyone in the world than the Australian outback. By 1984 as Razorback rolled out to theaters around the world, we’d already been subjected to outback madness like Wake In Fright, Stone, and Mad Max, which all equally portrayed the Australian wasteland as a nightmarish environment where the landscape and wildlife were actively trying to kill everyone who dared set stakes there. Not just that, the people who inhabited this desolate world of dust and mayhem were yahoos of an order not to be outdone by American portrayals of our own deep-woods and mountain lunatics, popularly found in pictures like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Delivervance.

Razorback takes what is established as the deadly Australian landscape and the maniacs who live there and cranks the volume past the decibel threshold, winding it all up neatly in a slick, visually arresting package that keeps you too busy watching to notice that the story is happening in fits and starts between long lulls of dull inactivity. It shifts gear no less than three times, with two plot decoys and a solid thirty minutes of running time before it finally settles on a main cast and gets down to business.

Is this movie about the obsessed pig hunter whose home was literally destroyed and grandson carried off by a massive razorback hog? Maybe. Is it about the wildlife reporter who travels to the outback to report on illegal pet food manufacture by two mutant hillbillies at their disgusting food processing plant? Maybe. Is it about her husband who travels to Australia, inquiring about her disappearance? Yes, actually it is. But it takes a while to get there. In between feral hog attacks and the gnarly puppet that perpetrates them is this bonkers gonzo tale about the Baker brothers, owners and operators of Petpack, a disgusting charnel house in the middle of nowhere where they take the dozens of kangaroos and hogs that they poached, grind them down, and then stuff into cans to be sold as pet food. In a movie already stuffed to the gills with wild thrills, these two are like something out of a Troma movie and they’ll stop at nothing to hide the fact that attacking wildlife reporter, Beth Winters, led directly to her death, having been eaten by a gigantic feral hog.

As far as stories go it’s about as simple as you get and would be tragically anemic were it not for Mulcahy’s insistence of packing every shot with baroque music video elements. In other video directors turned feature directors, I find this sort of visual saturation to be annoying as hell. Ask me about Tarsem Singh’s tedious but beautiful horror movie, The Cell, sometime. And maybe it’s just because I love Highlander and am already firmly on board and in Mulcahy’s camp but the sky-high visual language of Razorback doesn’t get under my skin in the same way that The Cell’s does. Maybe it’s because at the same time that Mulcahy is letting his ego run wild on the picture, there’s not much else going on and the film’s gonzo flavor assimilates nicely with the rest of the movie, a movie that is desperately trying to freak you out with the cast of hollering maniacs who live at the edge of the world. Burnt out husk of a car suspended in the branches of a tree in the middle of a night shot in a wind-swept wasteland? Makes perfect sense to me! Demonic reflective light in the eyes of our psychotic poacher brothers? Why not? The Baker Brothers drive a Frankenstein’s monster of a truck, welded with rusty steel plate like a something from Lord Humungous’s gang? Give it to me with both barrels. Just go ahead and inject it all into my veins.

The production design certainly wouldn’t work without a solid director of photography, however, and thanks to Dean Semler, who only a few years before slam dunked on the entire world with The Road Warrior, all the dusty night shots of silhouettes on colored gels comes together in a way that makes the action on screen hit with a ferocity that the entire movie would be sunk without.

Most animal attack movies, particularly those made since Sharknado, give you way too much animal and the problem with these flicks is that they’re all operating on a level well-below that of Jaws, a Hollywood studio picture with a Hollywood studio budget. A movie that, in spite of this budget and studio support, also realized its shortcomings in the form of a shark model that just wasn’t up to snuff. Spielberg did the smart thing and made sure that you never get a good look at the model and when you do, the look is no more than a glance. Razorback is one of those movies operating below the Jaws standard but unlike others with crappy alligator and bear dummies, it’s working with a pretty good-looking but poorly animated feral hog. Mulcahy’s restraint in the Spielberg model often works to his advantage, keeping the full dummy partially in frame and uses motion and camera trickery to give the pig a sense of velocity and destruction. Unlike Jaws, though, Razorback is often frustrating in how it plays the game a little too safely, saving the best looks at the pig for up-close action shots. A little confidence in their special effects would have gone a long way since we’re all here to see a giant feral hog.

Hardly a classic, Razorback is still a lot of fun owing to a great pig dummy, Russell Mulcahy’s gonzo music video approach to what would have been an otherwise standard Jaws ripoff, topped off with a cast of lunatics and outback hicks. There aren’t too many horror movies like it. It has a crazed energy, reflective of the danger that most Australian exploitation movies have as a result of their nation’s wild west approach to exploitation movie making and Mulcahy’s prior experience in the MTV arena of high profile musical artists engaged in an escalating arms race to keep up with Michael Jackson’s theatrical standards. He’d pull it in and tighten up his craft the next time around when he released his next picture in 1986, an action movie without peer, Highlander.