Razorback (1984)

It's safe to say I would not want to live in Everett De Roche's Australia. If you don't get killed by some trucker and dumped beside the road, perhaps you'll have a run-in with a comatose telekinetic who can kill you from a million miles away with nothing more than his mind. And that's to say nothing of the local wildlife: first, they were karmic enforcers in Long Weekend, taking revenge on humanity for their mistreatment of the environment, and now they're not much more than chum for the chaotic force of nature at the center of 1984's Razorback.

I would normally summarize the film, but honestly: I feel that doing so would just spoil it. It isn't hard to get the gist: a gigantic, freakishly large boar is loose in the Australian outback wreaking havoc on anything and everything that it runs into (or rather through,) and really that's probably all you should know going in. The premise was clearly inspired by the dingo that ate that poor woman's baby that one time (look it up.) Within the first two minutes, we've already seen the titular razorback tear through a nice, quiet home and apparently scarf down an infant on his way through, and you just instantly understand what kind of film you're dealing with.

The thing is, since it was written by someone with loads of talent to spare e.g. Everett De Roche, the film's first act is actually rather gripping and not a little shocking. De Roche still can't shake off the specter of Hitchcock, and so the entire opening half-hour of this film ends up being nothing more than ingeniously constructed misdirection ala the decoy protagonist of Psycho's early death. And despite this shocking turn of events, a turn that breaks all the rules on what narratives should and shouldn't do, it somehow works. Sure, it forces a kind of reset, but at that point, you're invested enough that you don't mind, and besides: it becomes clear in an instant that anything can happen, and that this film is not fucking around, both things that are positives in any great horror film.

Yes, as is typical for films written by De Roche, Razorback is chock full of well-rounded characters with solid motivations. The likable characters are likable enough that we absolutely don't want to see them get painfully et and shat out by a giant pig, and the unlikable ones are so despicable that we can't wait to see it happen to them; screenwriting at its very finest. The film is still patient in this regard, however, and so for a while, we're left with mostly good people getting killed in the worst way possible while our villains get free reign to roam around unmolested, which may be too much for some in the audience to bear. Eventually, this balance is redressed, but up until that point arrives, I just want to shout at the TV "Kill off the fucking band of hooligans already!" Christ, they're like a wild card the film can pull any time things are looking up for the characters, and their motivations aren't quite as strong as the other characters in that I mostly have no idea why they care or why they're here at all.

Visually, the film gives you what you want from a film set in the Australian outback: lots of dusty shots of vast expanses of thin shrubbery. It all looks wonderful. At one point, a character begins to dream of walking across these insane alien landscapes, and I'm unsure of whether or not these were real or just studio trickery, but holy crap they look beautiful. Otherwise, the film keeps a grounded aesthetic that should be familiar to fans of Australian film. And for fans of Mad Max, as is so often the case, there's precisely one minute or so of exciting vehicular dueling just in case you forgot where this film's country of origin.

It's just a well-made, well-considered film. Well acted, well lit, in-focus, intelligently written: it has it all. The film simply excels at building suspense. Yes, for a while, I was all set to have little to nothing interesting to say about this obscure horror gem besides "It's great!" ...That is until the second half of the film was well underway and I began to notice everything I loved about the film disappearing before my eyes to be replaced by some of the worst sequences of action in a creature feature that I've ever seen. It's like the film only knew how to do the build-up effectively, which is usually the part everyone else screws up! Each time a big money shot seems just on the verge of appearing and elevating things, something misfires and the film chokes. And that's me saying this; a modern viewer who somehow got lost on the tubes and ended up here would be nowhere near as forgiving.

Generally, the misfires appear to be the result of bizarre editing choices, which leaves me wanting to put all the blame on the editor. The thing is, now that I've done a bit of research, it appears that this is just the director Russell Mulcahy's style and that it may have been his creative decision to make the whole thing look like crap. It's really a bummer, man. They built this giant animatronic boar, and it looks so great, yet they mask it with post-production shaking of the screen, lots of cutting, heavily-cropped, mismatched shots of the beast from a million different dutch angles, and anything else they can to make one feel violently ill instead of immersed within the film's climatic showdown. It just goes to show how important good direction is, as the bum third act is almost enough to ruin a great script. And it also showed, nearly thirty years before that crappy The Thing prequel film, that having practical effects is pointless if you're going to get cold feet during post-production and try to mask them all with digital garbage.

All of this leaves me with mixed feelings. Razorback is absolutely a film worth watching for many fans of vintage horror cinema, as its opening half-hour is incredible, and the narrative is satisfying on its own even if the climax the film builds up to ends up kind of falling completely flat. It's clear that Everett De Roche's material deserved better direction here, and that Russell Mulcahy is no Richard Franklin, but it's still pretty easy to recommend Razorback to anyone who likes a good horror yarn, especially those old-school creature features. It's no Tremors, but not much else is. All of this has got me wondering though: is Jaws a folk horror film? I probably shouldn't consider this a folk horror film if I wouldn't consider that one, but on the other hand, this film is pretty earthy, and it's all about uncompromising, uncaring nature and how we fit into it, so maybe I can get away with describing it as such. Perhaps I'm stretching though.