Razorback

I first saw Razorback as part of Joe Bob Briggs’s MonsterVision, which was one of my primary means of discovering new films beyond my small-town video store and Channel 11’s Saturday Afternoon Movies. It was late at night, I was probably a few Coca-Colas into a cable-movie marathon, and this creature feature absolutely blew my mind. A few years later, I successfully tracked down a VHS copy that promised “A hog-wild tale of terror in the Australian outback” and proceeded to spread the porcine gospel of Russell Mulcahy’s fever dream of a film to my friends.

Much better than a movie about a giant wild boar terrorizing the Australian Outback has any right to be, Razorback—written by Everett De Roche (responsible for some of the best Australian genre scripts, such as Long Weekend, Patrick, and Roadgames—smartly simplifies the over-padded source novel’s storylines (including a diamond-smuggling ring and some unnecessary romantic subplots) and focuses on the ones that matter. It opens with a terrifying sequence in which Jake Cullen (the great character actor Bill Kerr) loses his grandson to the giant boar—though nobody believes him, echoing, of course, the Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton dingo-baby-snatching case that had captivated the world just a few years earlier. The action then fast-forwards two years to follow Beth Winters (Judy Morris), who is in the Outback documenting the poaching of Australian wildlife. After she catches the despicable brothers Benny and Dicko Baker (Chris Haywood and David Argue) chopping up kangaroos into pet food, they chase her down, and mid–rape attempt, the boar drives them off, then attacks and kills her.

Trying to find her, Beth’s husband, Carl (Gregory Harrison), quickly crosses paths with Jake, now a grizzled hunter obsessed with killing the monster that took his grandson, and Sarah Cameron (Arkie Whitely), a scientist studying the local wild pig population. The film transforms into survival horror as Carl is confronted with Beth’s mysterious disappearance and the ominous presence of the boar. Clearly modeled after Jaws (the making-of documentary is even called Jaws on Trotters), the film also contains pretty direct homages to both Psycho and An American Werewolf in London. Razorback is a who’s who of Australian character actors and Ozploitation veterans, shot by Dean Semler (the DP of The Road Warrior, who would go on to have a prolific career in America), but it’s Mulcahy’s direction that really shines here.

Mulcahy had established his reputation directing music videos for the likes of Duran Duran, Elton John, and The Tubes before making his narrative feature debut with Razorback. The colorful film, offering wild transitions and stylistic editing flourishes, smartly limits the on-screen time of the main monster, an animatronic that ate up most of the movie’s budget but still looks pretty campy. It is easy to see how Mulcahy launched his big-screen career here, offering some truly standout sequences involving a tense kangaroo hunt and Carl’s increasingly apocalyptic hallucinations. Despite being known as a country where pretty much every creature can kill you, Australia has surprisingly few animal-attack films, and Razorback may be the best of them.