Directors/Screenplay – Cameron Cairnes & Colin Cairnes, Producers – Kate Croser & Julie Ryan, Photography – John Brawley, Music – Glenn Richards, Visual Effects Supervisor – Adam White, Makeup Effects – Fiona Rees-Jones, Prosthetics Designer – Wicked of Oz Studios – Supervisor – Justin Dix), Production Design – Tony Cronin. Production Company – The Works/Screen Australia/Cyan Films/South Australian Film Corporation/Film Victoria/Melbourne International Film Festival Premiere Fund.
Cast
Damon Herriman (Reg Morgan), Anna McGahan (Sophie), Angus Sampson (Lindsay Morgan), Jamie Kristian (Wes), Oliver Ackland (James), Chrissie Page (Nancy), John Jarratt (Sergeant Burke)
Plot
Three friends, Sophie, James and Wes, are travelling to a concert when their vehicle breaks down outside the Outback town of Yandiot. They persuade the passing Reg Morgan to give them a ride. He runs an organic farm with his brother Lindsay. What they do not known is that Reg and Lindsay have been claiming the bodies of roadkill victims in the area to use in their fertiliser. Reg now makes the three of them prisoner and takes them back to the farm where he persuades Lindsay they could kill them to use in the fertiliser. However, things don’t quite go to plan.
100 Bloody Acres was a directorial debut for Australian brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes. The two subsequently went on to make Scare Campaign (2016), along with assorted tv work.
100 Bloody Acres is a Backwoods Brutality film, a term I have coined to refer to the genre that appeared in the 1970s with films like Straw Dogs (1971), Deliverance (1972), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977) in which city dwellers would stray into the backwoods and run afoul of and be tortured and even cannibalised by the hicks and hillbillies that lived there. Australia had ventured into the genre several years earlier with the breakout international hit Wolf Creek (2005) – indeed, that film’s villain John Jarratt makes a small appearance here as a rural police officer who ends up being killed.
That said, 100 Bloody Acres falls more into being a comedy take on the Backwoods Brutality film. The parody of the cycle resembles something of Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010) and its inversion of many of the genre’s clichés. The theme of rural farmers using human blood to make organic fertiliser also has an undeniable similarity to the blackly comedic Motel Hell (1980).
(l to r) Brothers Reg (Damon Herriman) and Lindsay Morgan (Angus Sampson)
The Cairnes brothers play the film with a sense of humour. Everything comes with a fast pace and they are constantly having characters stumbling over their own comic ineptitude – a bound Jamie Kristian trying to get a knife to free himself at the same time as tripping on LSD; John Jarratt’s discovery of a severed foot; the scenes with the appearance of Aunt Nancy (Chrissie Page) amid assorted butcheries.
All of the characters are introduced with a broadness of accent that is neck deep in Aussie colloquialism in ways that take you aback. Amidst this, Anna McGahan has a likeable perkiness. The interesting face present is Angus Sampson as the heavyset brother – Sampson had just come to fame in Insidious (2010) and subsequent sequels and this role as a domineering and aggressive killer is at 180 degrees remove from that. Damon Herriman plays the nice guy brother, although did later go on to play Charles Manson in tv’s Mindhunter (2017-9).
