Australians and Kiwis aren’t good at making horror movies – we’re fucking great at it.
That ain’t hyperbole, either: take a look at our track record. We have contributed a great deal more to the international horror scene than we are ever given credit for, and yet when it comes to discussing our output, it’s only ever the same names that get mentioned: Wolf Creek. The Babadook. What We Do In The Shadows. And, uh… Not much else.
And yet the annals of Aussie and NZ horror cinema are dotted with undervalued gems, stunning films that deserve to be championed, and shouted about, and poured over, and loved. To that end, here’s a list of some of our finest B-great beauties, the messy masterpieces that, if you haven’t watched, you need to. Like, now.
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1. Razorback
Though Razborback has long been compared to Jaws, in truth, Russell Mulcahy’s garish, noiry flick about a killer boar is much stranger than that Spielberg staple. Mulcahy is a true visual stylist – he is, after all, the man behind Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’ video – and his oversaturated tones call to mind the work of Italian Giallo innovator Dario Argento. Indeed, it’s Mulcahy’s heavy use of colour imagery and slavish use of shadows that makes Razorback what it is: a strange, stylised masterwork.
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2. The Long Weekend
You probably haven’t heard of Everett De Roche, but lemme tell you now: he is the artist you’ve never known your life was missing. This entire list could be comprised of films he had a hand in – in fact, he wrote Razorback, so you’ve already been reading about him without even realising it.
He also penned The Long Weekend, a stark, stripped-down film that sees a young couple fighting against Mother Nature herself after they spend an ill-fated camping trip littering and generally being pesky towards ‘Strayan flora and faunae. A potent exploration of the uncomfortable relationship we Aussies have with the land in which we live, the film shares structural and symbolic similarities with Wake In Fright, another under-appreciated masterpiece about men and women making do in an inhospitable landscape. And just check out the creepy, baritone narration in that trailer above, wouldja? Perfection.
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3. Dead End Drive-In
Perhaps the strangest film on this list – and that’s certainly saying something – Dead End Drive-In crumples up sci-fi, thriller and horror into one neon-lit ball. Concerning itself with a town that elects to lock all its youth into a drive-in cinema complex that rapidly begins to resemble a prison, the film is an artful piece of magic realism, obsessed with the disregard older generations have towards the concerns of the young. In many ways, it’s one of the few true pieces of punk cinema Australia has to offer, a renegade work of art with a belly full of rage and one of the spikiest mohawks around.
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4. The Plumber
Before Peter Weir started making mainstream – AKA boring – period pieces like Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World, he was one of Australia’s finest genre filmmakers. Though his film The Cars That Ate Paris is pulpy good fun, it’s his 1979 TV movie The Plumber that represents his slickest entry into the horror canon. A distinctly Hitchockian work that also pilfers an ample amount of style from Roman Polanski, the work takes on the unsettling topic of voyeurism head on, implicating the audience in a tale about a mysterious stranger tormenting a young couple in an apartment block. Polished, ugly fun. And, speaking of ugly…
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5. The Ugly
Our first entry from NZ is a little known work from 1997, the debut film for writer/director Scott Reynolds. Though The Ugly’s plot is familiar – the film concerns a young psychologist attempting to get into the head of a deranged serial killer (Silence Of The Lambs, much?) – Reynolds reveals himself to be a master stylist, and the film is full of odd, off-kilter touches. A dark piece that ultimately more resembles a fable than anything in the crime-horror canon, the only real shame associated with the film is Reynolds’ eventual disappearing act: he only made a handful more features before vanishing from the scene in 2009.
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6. Housebound
The most recent horror flick on this list, Housebound received the stamp of approval from none other than Peter Jackson himself (but more on him later). A delicious, gooey horror comedy, the movie gains a great number of laughs from playing with the conventions of the genre – most notably, the tired old trope of heroes refusing to leave their obviously haunted homes even in the face of clear paranormal activity. In Housebound, our hero can’t leave – she’s under house arrest – allowing writer/director Gerard Johnson to create a distinct sense of claustrophobia. Good stuff.
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7. Road Games
One last contribution from De Roche, Road Games is a play on the classic Rear Window scenario, but with a notable twist: the majority of the film takes place in a moving car, as a young woman (expertly played by Jamie Lee Curtis) teams up with a truck driver (Stacy Keach) to take down a serial killer barrelling down the highway in a van. Unbelievably taut, the work has all the characteristics of De Roche’s finest writing: it’s clever, cruel, and controlled.
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8. Meet The Feebles
When the inevitable day comes, and humanity finds itself being judged by a violent alien race/divine power, I argue that Peter Jackson’s Meet The Feebles should be offered up as our very finest work of art. If anything deserves to absolve the human race of its crimes, it’s this film, the most unbelievably ugly, demented, unhinged creation ever thrust messily into the world. Citizen Kane is nothing compared to Meet The Feebles; the ceiling of the Sistine chapel is just a sketch.
There is no defending this film, a gutter-mouthed riff on Sesame Street fare that focuses on a gaggle of horrendously inappropriate puppets as they fuck, fight, vomit and sing, all while trying to stage a Muppets-esque weekly show. But in its iron-clad desire to be as unapologetically gross as possible, it reaches great heights of deranged beauty: nothing about the film is half-arsed, so every putrid second of celluloid rushes by like a sickly sweet bad dream.
It is a horror film, and a musical, and a comedy, and also none of those things – a belching bad time that shits on genre and tries its best to offend absolutely everyone in every conceivable way. Watch this film. Then, when it’s over, watch it again. Dedicate your life to this utter torrent of filth, and you will be rewarded in ways you can’t imagine – you will be defiled into devotion, and you will never be the same.
