Before he reached the big-time with Highlander (1986), director Russell Mulcahy was making films in his native Australia. One of these was Razorback, a "nature gone wild" movie about a giant wild boar (i.e. "razorback") that stalks the Outback, killing and eating humans. The film follows two men who swear to kill the elusive yet deadly razorback: Jake Cullen, an Australian hunter who was powerless to stop the beast from killing and eating his grandson, and Carl Winters, a Canadian whose wife, an investigative journalist, was attacked by Australians and abandoned to the mercy of the razorback. Spoiler: she gets eaten, too. Together, Jake and Carl wage war against the monster. But can they kill it without becoming pig food? Razorback has a solid plot, but it is occasionally muddied by Mulcahy's stylistic flourishes. As he got his start as a music video director, many sequences feel like they were shot for MTV instead of the silver screen. Mulcahy fails to blend horror and the bombastic stylization of late 80s media with the success that Sam Raimi had with the Evil Dead series. But Razorback is still a moderately entertaining, if somewhat flawed, monster flick.
6/10
Reminds me of when I was reading some of the stuff that Mulcahy wanted to include in Highlander that he wasn't able to due to technical limitations. One of them was that he wanted a giant lightning-dragon to randomly sprout from the Kurgan's dead body that Connor would have to defeat before he could have the quickening. Made me happy for those limitations.
ReplyDeleteSame here. Still, HIGHLANDER has some truly impressive practical effects. For example, in the first fight in the parking lot, Mulcahy had car batteries attached to the swords so that when they clashed giant sparks shot out!
Delete