Review of Razorback (1984) by Brendan O — 06 Mar 2011

This movie shouldn't totally work as well as it does. It's pretty clearly a Jaws rip-off (or homage if you will) as it's about a giant animal that attacks people - and a much bigger animal than the others around it, distinct that way - and how three people go after it... well, at first anyway. It should be just an homage, but Russell Mulcahy, who later did Highlander, brings something else to the table, which is unadalterated weirdness. The protagonist is a man who loses his cinematographer girlfriend to the Razorback monster and decides to go after it, with (at first) some help from some ruff-house outback folk who strand him in the Australian wilderness until he finds some help.

The film's weirdness comes from tone. Some of the action is somewhat standard, as is a climax that takes place in a factory with lots of smoke-machine-made fog and chains, but it's also got camerawork that is very unusual, compositions that take into account the bizarreness of the Outback and what this outsider-guy is up against, and ocassionally it gets trippy. It should be distracting, but in reality it helps to heighten the paranoia and tension: you can't trust most of the characters in this film, mainly cause they're just bad psychopathic backwoods-Aussie folk, and, of course, that big boar could be anywhere.

It certainly still feels dated being from the 80's (again, lots of SMOKE and FOG, not a bad thing just what it is), but that's part of its charm when it occurs. When it gets to being exciting Mulcahy and writer Everett DeRoche (veteran of many Aussie-explotation movies) ramp up both the suspense and the black-humor; there's a scene where a fat guy is sitting at home watching his TV, the razorback hooked up to part of the house, and when he runs away he takes half of the house (and the TV) with him! That and a few requisite Aiustralian jokes get the job done.

All in all this is a surprise; a tightly constructed, surreal horror-action film with the overtones of Jaws but a director with something to say and (at the time) something to prove as a genre-maker. If it was on late-night TV I would watch it in a heart-beat.