The Pig Was Cool
BY
Nick Pinkerton
On the hogs-gone-wild Ozploitation flick, Razorback (1984).
Razorback plays 7 Ludlow beginning on Friday, March 1 as part of Animal Farm: Pigs.
Speculating on the origins of Razorback, Australian Russell Mulcahy’s 1984 debut dramatic feature, based on a 1981 Peter Brennan novel about a wild boar with a taste for human flesh and the havoc it wreaks in the outback, two very probable influences present themselves. The first is the massive international box office success of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), which inspired the production of a slew of knockoff “giant predator on a rampage” films still unabated almost a decade after its release—in fact, three years after Razorback, Oz would contribute another strong entry to the genre in the form of Arch Nicholson’s Dark Age, in which ranger John Jarratt sets off on the trail of a humungous saltwater crocodile running amok in the Northern Territories.
It is perhaps unsurprising that Australia, a country that can boast of being the scene of 40% of global shark bite deaths, should have an especial affinity to Spielberg’s film, which makes use of second unit footage shot in the waters near Dangerous Reef in South Australia by Ron and Valerie Taylor—but the other key influence on Razorback is a distinctly landbound piece of horror. On August 17, 1980, the camping holiday of Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton and husband Michael near Uluru, a rock formation that is sacred to the Indigenous peoples and a popular tourist destination, went horribly awry when their nine-week-old daughter, Azaria, was seized and presumably devoured by a rogue dingo. This, and the couple’s subsequent legal troubles, which involved their being charged with and convicted of doing away with the child themselves, were dramatized in Fred Schepisi’s 1988 Evil Angels (aka A Cry in the Dark), through which the line “The dingo took my baby!”—uttered by Meryl Streep, in the role of Chamberlain—would become enshrined in pop culture history.
Razorback opens with scenes of animal-inflicted infanticide and subsequent wrongful accusation that seem intended to evoke the Chamberlain case, still a hotly contested issue at the time of the film’s release: in 1984 Chamberlain was still in the midst of the appeal process while doing time in Darwin’s Berrimah prison, serving a life sentence with hard labor, fresh evidence supporting her version of events not to be discovered for another two years. The film begins in an isolated ranch-style house in the outback—the vicinity of Broken Hill, New South Wales, looking very much like the surface of Mars—in which a grandfather (Bill Kerr) dotes over his tow-headed toddler, comforting the tot as a sandstorm rattles the windows. “It’s only the wind,” he says, then to be quite definitely disproved when, about one minute of screentime later, the title character blasts through the walls of his home like a bristle-haired cannonball or the Kool-Aid Man on PCP, leaving the ruined residence in flames and the child nowhere to be seen. (Had Penelope Spheeris’s 1983 Suburbia, a film whose cold open shows a child being mauled to death by a stray dog, played Australia? What exactly was going on in the ’80s that encouraged onscreen child sacrifice?)
Razorback (1984)
Brennan’s “upgrading” of the scrawny, scrofulous dingo of the Chamberlain affair to a porker the size of a greater one-horn rhino parallels Mulcahy’s stylistic approach to the material, which could be described as over-overkill. From the ochre sandstorm of the opening to the cobalt blues of its night skies, the film’s colors have the intensity one associates with the dye transfer Kodachrome prints used in high-end advertising, and the sprinter’s pace tracking shot that follows the rampaging boar on its first charge is only a sampling of the acrobatic camerawork to come. Shot in widescreen that frequently curls at the edges with barrel distortion by Dean Semler, between the two Mad Max films he would make with George Miller, Razorback is one of the most extravagantly backlit movies ever made, raked across with slanting beams that could come from no logically explained light source. The contemporary films of Spielberg, no stranger to backlighting himself, are positively frugal with the effect when placed next to Razorback, a film so backlit that it’s backlights have backlighting.
It may come as no surprise that the Melbourne-born Mulcahy, who crams a maximum of visual impact into every frame and employs everything from wipe transitions to freeze frames to snap zooms to step printing in the course of Razorback, had started out in the music video field—in fact was one of its pioneers, with credits amassed during his time at Jon Roseman Productions including the clip for The Buggles’ 1979 “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the first music video to play on MTV on August 1, 1981, and for Fleetwood Mac’s “Gypsy,” the most expensive music video ever made at the time of its 1982 release. Complaints about “MTV style” and “style-over-substance” moviemaking can be found in abundance in highbrow criticism of the ’80s, a decade that saw flamboyant rejections of classical film grammar and frumpy naturalism flaring up around the world, from the cinéma du look in France, the minutely curated criminal cool of Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980) and Michael Mann’s Thief (1981), to the works of English commercial directors-cum-studio journeymen Ridley and Tony Scott. Putting aside value judgements towards the abovementioned bodies of work, there’s something a bit hidebound in that sniffy suspicion of “style” as something that needs necessarily be applied parsimoniously, and the assumption that MTV style was, axiomatically, negative.
It is difficult, however, to make a case for Mulcahy as a director of infallible taste and discretion—how anyone could look at the first dailies of Christopher Lambert in old-age make-up on the set of Highlander II: The Quickening (1991) and not immediately suspend production is one of film history’s great mysteries—but when his lurid, bombastic technique can be harnessed to the right material, it’s a formidable force. On Razorback, Mulcahy had the benefit of working with screenwriter Everett De Roche, the Maine-born expat whose name is signed to a half dozen of the finest Australian genre movies ever made: Richard Franklin’s Patrick (1978) and Roadgames (1981), Colin Eggleston’s Long Weekend (1978), Simon Wincer’s Snapshot (1979), Nicholson’s Fortress (1985), and, of course, the film under discussion, the product of De Roche’s intelligent streamlining of the source novel, shorn of several cumbersome subplots and built for speed.
Razorback (1984)
Following the trial of Jake, the Kerr character, suspected of the murder of his grandson but ultimately acquitted for lack of evidence, Razorback shifts its scene to New York City “Two Years Later,” where Beth (Judy Morris), a reporter specializing in exposés advocating against cruelty to animals, is bidding goodbye to her husband, Carl (American Gregory Harrison, on a vacation from Trapper John, M.D.), before heading Down Under to the fictional, flyblown backwater town of Gamulla to investigate the Petpak cannery, a place where kangaroos and wallabies by the thousands are being ground up into dog food. On the ground she meets the gruff, embittered Jake, who now devotes his days to tracking his Moby Dick on trotters, as well as the unfriendly locals, most memorably yobbo brothers Dicko and Benny Baker, who operate Petpak. The former, played by David Argue—a year removed from chasing teenaged Nicole Kidman through the Manly Waterworks in Brian Trenchard-Smith’s BMX Bandits (1983)—is a spotty little creep with moldy teeth, a perpetual runny nose, a patchy ducktail, and a closet full of garishly mismatched castoffs; the latter, played by Chris Haywood, a podgy oaf with a compulsive, bleating giggle and one milky blind eye that’s usually concealed behind shades. If ever a Hall of Fame was erected to the punky, Melbourne Lager tin-swilling brigandish grotesques that litter Australian pulp cinema, these two would be first rounders. (Their pick-up, a Mercedes-Benz Unimog U 1300 customized with jangling meathooks, armor plating, and a spiked battering ram jutting from the front grille, is also a minor masterpiece of hoon design.)
Dicko and Benny, sensing that the intrepid reporter knows too much about Petpak operations, run Beth off the road at night and are in the process of attempting to rape her when they’re interrupted by the megaboar, who makes a meal of her—an “out of the frying pan, into the fire” scenario if ever there was one. Her disappearance brings her fey New York husband—introduced wearing an effeminizing novelty apron that makes his torso appear to be that of a woman’s in lingerie, lest there be any doubt he’s no natural-born He-Man—to Gamulla, and an outback he’s ill-equipped to survive, where he begins an investigation of his own. On the ground, he initiates an ill-fated attempt to ingratiate himself with Dicko and Benny, who put him to work in the stygian bowels of Petpak, and invite him into the squalid underground lair they call home—a triumph by production designer Bryce Walmsley, who’d collaborated with Mulcahy on Elton John’s 1982 “video album” Visions. Their suspicions aroused by Carl’s questions about Beth, Dicko and Benny abandon him in the wilderness to die, where he makes a narrow escape from a sounder of hungry boars and takes a hallucinatory walkabout through a surreal landscape of mysterious monoliths, bottomless chasms, and colors not seen in nature since William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977). Carl is saved when he stumbles upon the home of Jake’s only friend besides his hunting dog, Sarah (Arkie Whiteley), a local who’s been surviving off of government grant money she earns by studying the migratory movement of the boar population, who’ve of late been subject to undue agitation and taken to eating their young.
Razorback (1984)
No explicit explanation is given for these phenomena, nor for the existence of a razorback of Paleolithic proportions sought by Jake, Carl, and Sarah, but one can extrapolate that these unnatural occurrences have something to do with the goings-on at Petpak, the ruthless culling of the kangaroo population, and the altogether questionable stewardship of the land by folks like Dicko and Benny, sadists who can’t see a canine in the road without making a point of swerving into it. This emphasis on the human impact on environment—and the environment’s response—is a recurring theme in De Roche-written films, and in Australian genre film more generally: in Long Weekend, a camping couple’s despoilation of a secluded beach leads to all-out assault by flora and fauna; in the De Roche-penned Frog Dreaming (1986), another Spielberg-inspired work that cops from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), none other than Henry “Elliott” Thomas himself is drawn into a mystery involving the Aboriginal myth of a “Kurdaitcha Man,” a kind of vengeful environmental watchdog; in Dark Ages, the rampaging croc, believed by the local Aboriginal people to be something close to a god, is discovered to have his reasons for making war and man, and is finally to be appeased rather than destroyed. (The year of the last-named film’s release, incidentally, saw the Australian band Midnight Oil’s eco-conscious anthem “Beds are Burning” climbing charts around the world.)
De Roche carves Razorback into a sturdy three-act structure, but it owes its air of apocalyptic augury to Mulcahy and Semler—images of blanched bones scattered around a polluted pond, car chassis suspended in the limbs of burnt-out gum tress, flayed ’roo carcasses and sluggish streams of offal, and a blood orange moon that seems to sit on the horizon line—as well as to the brawny, ominous synth soundtrack performed on a Fairlight CMI by Iva Davies of the band Icehouse (formerly Flowers), here composing his first film score. At moments Razorback feels like the pop cinema cousin of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Porcile (1969)—not only the part of that film where a suicidal Jean-Pierre Léaud voluntarily turns himself into hog slops, but the earlier section that follows Pierre Clémenti around the scorched earth environs of Mount Etna.
Whatever Razorback may owe to Jaws, its monster’s existence isn’t, as in Spielberg’s film, a fluke or aberration—it’s something that’s been summoned. From the belching smokestacks of Petpak to the livid, spectacularly striated sunsets that come from excess aerosols and blazing brushfires to the throwaway scene of a camel making a meal of a Coke can, Mulcahy’s film misses no opportunity to remind us of the human propensity for turning every place that we inhabit into a sty. Having demonstrated our preference for dwelling in a hellscape, then, it is only fitting that Mother Earth would provide us with proper demons for company.
Nick Pinkerton is a Cincinnati-born, Brooklyn-based writer focused on moving image-based art; his writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Artforum, Frieze, Reverse Shot, The Guardian, 4Columns, The Baffler, Rhizome, Harper’s, and the Village Voice. He is the editor of Bombast magazine, editor-at-large of Metrograph Journal, and maintains a Substack, Employee Picks. Publications include monographs on Mondo movies (True/False) and the films of Ruth Beckermann (Austrian Film Museum), a book on Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Fireflies Press), and a forthcoming critical biography of Jean Eustache (The Film Desk). The Sweet East, a film from his original screenplay directed by Sean Price Williams, premiered in the Quinzaine des Cinéastes section of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, is currently in wide release across US cinemas.
Razorback (1984)
