Beth Winters (Judy Morris), a resourceful and ambitious American journalist, travels to Australia to investigate kangaroos being killed for pet food in a small outback town. The perpetrators, Dicko (David Argue) and Benny (Chris Haywood), pursue Beth with intent to harm, but are scared away by a monstrous wild boar who finishes the job. Beth’s boring husband Carl (Gregory Harrison) travels down under to investigate her disappearance, where he encounters Dicko and Benny, the monstrous boar, and the tragic Jake Cullen (Bill Kerr), a vengeful hunter whose infant grandson was killed by the beast (although the film was based on a novel, it’s hard to ignore parallels with Azaria Chamberlain’s disappearance at Uluru a few years earlier).
Razorback was Russell Mulcahy’s second feature and—along with his impressive music videos—Hollywood calling card. It’s also his only Australian feature that’s of a piece with his American genre fare (Swimming Upstream and In Like Flynn are both dramas, though the latter has a whiff of adventure befitting its subject). Emerging in the thick of the film cycle retrospectively known as Ozploitation, it boasts a script by the master screenwriter of the genre, Everett De Roche, following his earlier screenplays for Patrick, Long Weekend, Snapshot, Harlequin, and Roadgames. De Roche was an American migrant, and he brought a Hollywood genre film sensibility to local productions.
Whilst Razorback contains some of De Roche’s signature gallows wit, the film’s characters are uninteresting and functional at best. Razorback is very much a Jaws rip-off, and makes the same cardinal mistake as many Jaws rip-offs and sequels: missing that Jaws’s star attraction is not the mechanical shark but the charming character work and chemistry of Roy Scheider’s Brody, Richard Dreyfuss’s Hooper, and Robert Shaw’s Quint. I like the ensemble cast of Piranha, but Richard Harris and Charlotte Rampling—gifted actors both—do little for Orca the Killer Whale, Charles Bronson is a leaden anchor for The White Buffalo, and so on.
Where De Roche’s Patrick and Roadgames director Richard Franklin indulged his Psycho love by helming its sequel in 1983, De Roche would exercise his own Psycho affection with Razorback by casting Beth as his Marion Crane/Janet Leigh, i.e. the slain Act One heroine. Morris is capable in the role and does a solid American accent, but never owns the screen in her limited time. Harrison is simply a boring screen presence: that part—the foreigner out of his depth—has been done better by other import stars before (Wake in Fright’s Gary Bond) and since (Rogue’s Michael Vartan). The Mad Max films aside, I’m fairly immune at this point to rampaging punk bogan antagonists hooning through the outback, so did not care for Dicko and Benny, despite appreciation for Argue and Paul Cox regular Haywood in other roles. Bill Kerr, acting in a similar grizzled patriarch vein to his role in Gallipoli, fares best and adds gravitas but is again constrained by type.
As
mentioned in my review of The Last Wave, there’s a strain in local cinema of
depicting Australia as a malignant landscape waiting to devour and decimate its
(typically Anglo) inhabitants. Sometimes the environment seeds dissoluteness
and self-destruction—see Wake in Fright or, more recently, Strangerland, a
film I’d intended to pair with Razorback in this piece but found aggravating
and dispiriting. Sometimes the land itself is destructive, absorbing its prey,
as in Picnic at Hanging Rock and the De Roche-penned Long Weekend. And sometimes,
it takes the form of a large, inexpressive animatronic hog. I write this in
jest: I appreciate the film’s creature design, and while the editing and
cinematography do not paper over the seams, the creature sequences are
effectively staged around the limited articulations of the boar props, making
dynamic use of light, shadow, smoke, and optical trickery. Following his
breakthrough work on Hoodwink and The Road Warrior, Razorback showcases some of
the most inventive—and certainly the most stylised—photography of DP Dean
Semler’s run on Australian films. Ultimately, the visuals and action set pieces
staged by Mulcahy and co are Razorback’s strengths and most memorable sequences.
Director Simon Wincer also emerged from Ozploitation with Snapshot and Harlequin, likewise adapted from De Roche scripts and featuring imported transatlantic stars. In the overall catalogue of Ozploitation titles, they’re fun but ultimately innocuous entries, which is characteristic of Wincer’s larger filmography. Following those early thrillers he transitioned into tales of national heroism, both human and equestrian, with Phar Lap and The Lighthorsemen: both very good films, though neither as resonant nor impactful as they could have been (the latter, however, showcases more exemplary Semler photography). Quigley Down Under is fun, Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man is fine, and then a lot of family films—Free Willy, Lightning Jack, The Phantom, Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles—all likeable, modest in ambition and execution, and benign in tone.
I don’t say this to denigrate Wincer: a well-rounded entertainment ecosystem needs guys like him, not to mention Mulcahy, who deliver affable programmers. And Lightning Jack, the first (and better) of Wincer’s two collaborations with Paul Hogan, is very affable. The film opens with Australian outlaw Lightning Jack Kane (Hogan) working in the Old West alongside the Younger Brothers—the historical sibling criminals partnered in both life and popular culture with Jesse James, and most notably played onscreen by the Carradine Brothers in The Long Riders. After the Youngers are killed in a botched bank robbery, Jack branches out on his own, paired with mute African-American Ben Doyle (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and pursued by the authorities.
Following the studio-slaying disaster of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, the American Western was unfashionable—at least with executives' purses—throughout the 1980s, though some cream rose to the top (Silverado, Pale Rider) and Australia churned out a few successful quasi-Westerns with The Man from Snowy River films and series Robbery Under Arms. The genre made a comeback in the 90s with Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven, and while I wouldn’t call the 1990s the strongest decade for the Western, I have a lot of fondness for those two critical peaks, not to mention the comedic takes (City Slickers), retellings of noted lawmen and outlaws (Wyatt Earp, Tombstone, Geronimo, Wild Bill), ethnic riffs on the genre (Posse, The Mask of Zorro, El Mariachi and Desperado), auteur takes (Dead Man, The Quick and the Dead), and my beloved Maverick. Lightning Jack capitalized on this renaissance, and is cut from the same comedic cloth as City Slickers and Maverick, milking humour from the juxtaposition of ostensibly more ineffectual and effeminate lead characters and the hyper-masculinity and professionalism of stoic Western heroes previously essayed by John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. To illustrate, Jack is introduced eating a shiny red apple, needs reading glasses (which he’s bashful about), and sleeps in pyjamas. He’s also lower status than his slain comrades, confused for British in newspaper reports, and dismissed by Pat Hingle’s sheriff as a “brainless and no account” nobody. Moreover, like Mel Gibson’s Maverick, he’s street smart and has cultivated some finely honed skills to compensate for other shortcomings: Maverick is the fastest draw in the West but “can’t hit shit”, while Jack has mastered playing dead on a galloping horse and accumulated a variety of superstitious charms and trinkets.
It’s curious that Gibson and Hogan—arguably Australia’s biggest export male stars of the 1980s and 90s—both starred in comedic Westerns released the same year. Neither is a parody in the Blazing Saddles sense—the Western elements are played fairy straight, and so are the heroes, though both films effectively utilize the irreverence and cheekiness already baked into Gibson and Hogan’s (then) screen personas. The film was a bounce back of sorts for Hogan after the failure of Almost an Angel, though early scenes prove my theory that Hogan is a bit dull as a solo screen presence and mainly clicks in the company of featured co-stars. Fortunately he’s swiftly paired with Gooding Jr., and the two have solid rapport. Following Boyz n the Hood and A Few Good Men, and ahead of Outbreak and his Oscar-winning role in Jerry Maguire, this was Gooding’s first high-profile role to employ his comedic traits—his diminutiveness and facial expressiveness, albeit not his voice—to good effect. Hogan also builds upon the low-energy overtures towards Eastwood-esque action heroism made in Crocodile Dundee II. (On a side note, I wonder if Judy Morris’s Razorback character, an American journalist visiting outback Australia, was an inspiration for Linda Kozlowski’s character in the Dundee films?).
Between this and Quigley Down Under, director Wincer has the distinction of directing more Westerns in the 1990s than Clint Eastwood and as many as Walter Hill and (counting The Postman as a futuristic Western) Kevin Costner. Befitting for the director who helmed Phar Lap, The Lighthorsemen, and later The Cup, Wincer—working with Mad Max DP David Eggby, a frequent Wincer and Rob Cohen collaborator—knows how to stage and shoot horse chases effectively. Whilst some of Lightning Jack’s interiors were shot locally, much of the film was shot on location in the US, and although modestly scaled compared to the major films of 1994—and indeed the major Westerns of 1994, Maverick and Wyatt Earp—there’s nonetheless instant, tangible production value that comes from shooting Westerns (ironic given the genre’s earliest output was known for being fast and cheap). That instant production value is there in both big and small moments, ranging from panning shots of a steam train pulling into a station to crane shots of a dusty, bustling main street to footage of riders forging paths across prairies, canyons, and John Ford’s very own canvas, Monument Valley.
Ben