Editorials
‘Razorback’: A Beautiful, Brutal Eco-Horror from Down Under [Horrors Elsewhere]
Horrors Elsewhere is a recurring column that spotlights a variety of movies from all around the globe, particularly those not from the United States. Fears may not be universal, but one thing is for sure — a scream is understood, always and everywhere.
Global infatuation with all things Australia was still under way when Russell Mulcahy unleashed a 1984 movie described as “Jaws on land.” The music-video director’s first feature came out toward the end of Australia’s New Wave era, and like other “Ozploitation” films before it, Razorback paints the outback as a lawless, unforgiving territory. This time, however, danger comes in the form of a giant, insatiable boar hiding in the continent’s treacherous backyard.
Lindsay Chamberlain’s highly publicized, 1980 case is the inspiration behind the movie’s brutal opening. The mother was vacationing in Uluru when her nine-week-old daughter was abducted, and after being convicted of a crime she blamed on a dingo, Chamberlain was later exonerated. Meanwhile, Razorback reimagines the real-life story; kangaroo hunter Jake Cullen (Bill Kerr) is babysitting when the film’s force of nature plows through his home and snatches his grandson, Scotty. Jake is brought up on charges for the boy’s disappearance, but he is ultimately acquitted due to a lack of evidence. Now the town pariah who believes a man-eating, rhino-sized razorback is roaming the area, Jake sets out to clear his name and avenge his grandchild.
Razorback attempts to do for boars what Jaws did for sharks. While Steven Spielberg cast a dark and permanent shadow on the shark’s reputation, Mulcahy’s movie requires more effort when convincing audiences these boars are nothing like Arnold Ziffel or Wilbur. The denizens of this overstated version of the outback are also skeptical toward the idea of a killer razorback. So to better grease the wheels and assure everyone wild hogs can be dangerous, the story immediately establishes no one is safe from the monster. By killing a baby at the film’s start instead of a hapless swimmer or teenage camper, Razorback makes its threat clear. The most innocent victim imaginable is executed with no hesitation. Even without visual confirmation of the infant’s death, Jake’s anguished, desperate howls are proof enough Scotty is long lost.
The bestial antagonists in movies like Razorback often have a symbolic role when they are not killing out of hunger or territorialism. Many analyses of Jaws see the great white as not only a menace to beachgoers but also capitalism. The boar has a similar reading; it stands in the way of Pet Pak, a pet food factory. Before reaching that point, though, the factory’s initial foil is an American reporter and animal rights campaigner named Beth Winters (Judy Morris). Leaving behind her husband Carl (Gregory Harrison) in New York, Beth heads to the outback to investigate the goings-on at Pet Pak.
Morris slips into the role of a do-gooder whose substantial love of animals outweighs her sense of self-preservation. She hopes to get the scoop on Pet Pak’s shady practices like illegally harvesting kangaroos to make dog food, but her rogue methods land her directly in harm’s way. Sadistic goons from the factory — one of whom helped discredit Jake at his trial — chase Beth down in the outback, try to rape her, and then leave her alone with the ravenous razorback. Idealists are not always rewarded in horror, and Beth is no exception to this unwritten rule. As it turns out, her horrifying death serves a higher purpose.
After Beth gets the Marion Crane treatment, husband Carl steps into the protagonist’s shoes. Razorback feels almost like a different movie from here on out, but this narrative curveball is in line with the source material; the novel by Peter Brennan has multiple subplots overlapping one another. Everett De Roche’s screenplay trims the book’s fat — the entire thread about diamond smuggling is cut out — and adds more razorback action. Before the climactic conclusion comes, Carl first seeks answers from Jake as well as the Pet Pak punks responsible for Beth’s fatal run-in with the boar.
Although it might feel like a mid-film lull, Carl’s protracted journey to closure is not without its benefits. Mulcahy’s history in music videos is transparent all throughout the second act. He and cinematographer Dean Semler draw beauty from a place not always thought of as beautiful in Ozploitation; the outback’s loveliness comes out in spite of its arid climate and precarious geography. Gorgeous, abnormally colored landscapes and uncanny light sources make up some of the more striking visuals here. On top of that are the frightful, Dali-like mirages and hallucinations that do more to illustrate Carl’s state of weariness and grief than dialogue ever could.
Mulcahy’s film is both a testament to the size of the outback — only a region as big and sparsely populated as this could hide such a prodigious animal in plain sight — and an aggressive reminder of mankind’s place in the world. The more people encroach on nature, the more it retaliates. The razorback is one example of how an ecosystem corrects the imbalance; it chooses an agent to remove the poison. The true monster winds up being the American company using Australia’s natural resources and depriving the boar of kangaroos. The razorback would not have to seek out food elsewhere had it not been for Pet Pak. As much as Razorback roots itself in reality without succumbing to unearthly measures, there is a debatable air of magic to the events within. A workable theory has the beast acting on the outback’s hopes and fears, and maybe Beth’s spirit is somehow adding fuel to the fire. Nothing on screen explicitly supports a mystical angle, but in the same vein as Princess Mononoke, the environment finds other means of delaying the inevitable destruction brought on by humans.
Nature’s nightmare is reflected darkly through the razorback’s burning, merciless eyes, and audiences will have trouble looking away. There was a time when Mulcahy’s film was dismissed as too imitative or too oddball, but now it is seen in a whole new light. The story hosts a modest cache of nuance, and the visual output is tremendous. Most of all, buried beneath the ecological dread and creature mayhem is a visual poem about the outback, which has never looked so equally surreal and stark.
Auteur Filmmaking is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days in reference to big name directors like Quentin Tarantino and even Wes Anderson, but the truth is that film is a collective medium, and no one person can be responsible for every single aspect of a particular production. However, the smaller a film’s budget, the bigger the individual impact of every creative decision behind it – and the easier it becomes to identify a genuine auteur.
This isn’t necessarily a judgement of value, as blockbuster filmmaking comes with its own challenges and a good movie remains a miracle regardless of how big the crew is, but I’ve always been more interested in soulful b-movies produced by handfuls of passionate artists than blockbusters backed by creative armies.
That’s why I love exploring low-budget franchises that never left the hands of their original creators, as you really get to know the artists involved with these flicks and can accompany their evolution over a period of time. With that in mind, I’d like to invite readers to join me in this multi-part series as we look into a vampire saga helmed by one of the most fascinating auteurs of the 1990s. Naturally, I’m referring to Ted Nicolaou’s criminally underrated Subspecies!
The Birth of an Unlikely Horror Franchise
A proud graduate of the University of Texas’ Film program, Nicolaou got his start in the industry as a sound technician working on Tobe Hooper’s original Texas Chain Saw Massacre. From there, the filmmaker would go on to work for notorious indie producer Charles Band, the founder of both Empire Pictures and Full Moon Productions. According to Nicolaou, Band would usually contact him with an offer to direct a feature after more prominent filmmakers, such as the late, great Stuart Gordon, had already refused, meaning that his projects tended to have lower budgets and more inexperienced crew members.
The plans for Subspecies began almost immediately after the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, with screenwriter David Pabian turning in an initial draft of the film after a Romanian producer contacted Band and explained that Romanian tax incentives could cover the cost of film production there so long as Full Moon took care of the post-production process. Since Stuart Gordon was unwilling to travel to Romania, Ted Nicolaou ended up taking over the picture.
However, while the financial incentives meant that this Romanian-American co-production could look and feel much more expensive than it really was, with Nicolaou scouting for locations in advance and selecting real castle ruins to be featured in the movie, the director was soon faced with an incredibly difficult shooting process. In interviews, Nicolaou would later describe the experience as something of a nightmare, with language barriers and the generalized distrust of capitalist outsiders sabotaging many of the team’s plans for the film.
In fact, the script, which had already been altered by Band, ultimately had portions of it rewritten by both Jack Canson and Nicolaou himself in an attempt to adapt the story to their unique limitations.
Radu Is One of Horror’s Greatest Underrated Villains
In the finished film, which was released directly to video in 1991, we follow a pair of American anthropology students, Michelle (Laura Mae Tate) and Lillian (Michelle McBride), as they reunite with their Romanian colleague Mara (Irina Movila) in her native land. The group intends to study the folklore surrounding the secluded town of Prejmer, but their research is cut short by the return of Radu Vladislas (Anders Hove) – the evil son of a vampire king (Angus Scrimm) who had previously established a truce with the region’s human residents. It’s now up to Radu’s human-loving half-brother Stefan (Michael Watson) to protect the girls from a fate worse than death as the power-hungry vampire seeks to control a magical artifact known as the Bloodstone.
Right off the bat, you may have noticed that the film’s premise sounds decidedly old-fashioned when compared to other vampire movies from around the same time. While the 1990s saw the rise of cool-looking bloodsuckers with badass elements borrowed from Westerns, as well as the sexy aristocrats of Anne Rice’s stories, Subspecies has a lot more in common with Nosferatu and the Hammer Horror series than any of its contemporaries.
This is both a blessing and a curse, as the film falls victim to overly familiar genre tropes while also standing out as a rare example of a ’90s vampire flick that isn’t afraid to flex its muscles as a Creature Feature. In fact, I’d argue that the presence of age-old clichés is a small price to pay when confronted with one of the most compelling vampire antagonists in all of cinema.
Named after Vlad the Impaler’s real-life brother, Anders Hove’s Radu is such a fascinating character and the main reason why Subspecies is still worth watching 35 years later. From his animalistic mannerisms to the joy he feels in simply existing as a chaotic creature of the night, and that’s not even mentioning the iconic makeup that almost certainly inspired the undead from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Radu is a hypnotic presence harkening back to a time when audiences didn’t mind purely evil villains that couldn’t be redeemed through tragic backstories or sex appeal.
Gothic Atmosphere on an Indie Budget
Of course, the film’s Romanian setting and authentic art direction do a lot of the heavy lifting whenever Radu isn’t around. From the masked festivals of the village to the visually interesting selection of local extras, Subspecies’ multicultural elements help it to stand out when compared to similar flicks from the ’90s.
That being said, Nicolaou’s unique eye for special effects and exciting action sequences – as well as Vlad Paunescu’s excellent cinematography – make the movie a delight for fans of expressionist cinema and old-timey gothic horror. While the crew is obviously dealing with limited resources, many of the flick’s blemishes (such as the odd stop-motion demons that serve Radu) end up feeling more like charming idiosyncrasies than actual flaws.
I’d argue that the only real issue here is pacing, as there are long stretches of film where the protagonists are simply bumbling around without realizing what’s really going on around them. Thankfully, the gorgeous visuals and surprisingly effective soundtrack usually make up for this. Besides, how can you dislike a movie where shotgun shells are loaded with rosary beads and our lead vampires duke it out in a dramatic swordfight that would feel out of place during the golden age of Hollywood?
Your overall enjoyment of Subspecies will mostly depend on whether or not you find low-budget corner-cutting and janky practical effects charming rather than distracting, but I know I’ll keep coming back to this Full Moon feature again and again in the future.
That being said, while this first movie is worth revisiting by its own merits as the birth of an indie horror icon, I’d like to invite you to join us as we look into the cult sequel Bloodstone: Subspecies II soon.
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