100 Bloody Acres

Dir: Cameron Cairnes, Colin Cairnes

2012

*

The Brothers' Cairnes bring very little to abduction-horror genre, other than another missed opportunity. The film begins with three young persons hitch-hiking their way to a music festival in the south Australian countryside. All three are immediately irritating and each fit into an overused character trait. They are picked up by Reg, who along with his brother Lindsay, own a small blood and bone fertilizer business. No points in guessing where the story goes from there. The sub-genre, particularly in Australia, has been covered time and again and has been done much better. The film is advertised as both a comedy and a horror, which I'm afraid is woefully inaccurate. The few gory scenes aside, it is barely a horror, certainly not the great horror film I think it could have been. It doesn't come close to being funny, so it's certainly not a comedy. The script is what really lets the film down. There aren't any great performances either but I believe at least a couple of the cast members could have done more, had their lines and characters been written a little better. Lindsay, the film's main bad guy, falls very short of what the viewer is led to expect from him. The story could have gone any number of different ways, it was quite astonishing - especially for an independent film with a clearly higher than average budget - when it plodded along the exact route you thought, but hoped it wouldn't go down. If they wanted to do comedy they should have gone full Coen Brothers (maybe they thought they were) or they should have cut the attempts at humour and gone full creepy horror. Either one would have far better than what they ended up with. I honestly can't think of any redeeming feature this film has, other than all the characters I disliked died. Australian horror is much better than this.