Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57943 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-04-25
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Formats: PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 91 minutes

Synopsis
Carl travels to a small outback town in order to search for his missing wife, Beth. While the local police assume that Beth has fallen down a mineshaft, a local hunter has different ideas and believes that she has fallen victim to the deadly Razorback...

Customer Reviews

Surprisingly good and smart little horror movie
There is so many horror movies around, and so many of them are bad, that it is very hard to find something that is really worth watching. Well, this is one of the few that make the list. The appeal of this movie is its originality - just think, what can be more terrifying for a human being that being eaten alive? Well, it is being eaten alive by a form of life that we consider mostly harmless, but low and disgusting - in a word, a pig.
And then there is the whole visual aspect of the movie, really well polished by Russel Mulcahy. There is something really unusual and unsettling in the way this movie shows some banal things, like a sunset in the desert or some abandoned farm. All in all it is a rare original and smart horror movie - if you are in this kind of things, go and get it.

RAZORBACK DVD
An Australian version of Razorback from Umbrella entertainment is coming out september 21st. It is a special edition

The Aspect Ratio 2:35:1
Dolby 5.1
Deleted Scenes
Doco "Jaws on Trotters" which is 70 minutes long interviews with Director Russell Mulcahy, Producer Hal McElroy, Razorback designer Bob McCarron and cast members Judy Morris, Chris Haywood
Audio recollections from Gregory Harrison
Theatrical Trailer
Stills and poster gallery

The Umbrella will be much better. Its all regions but you need a PAL system
You can order it from HMV

Good horror which could have been a classic
From its atmospheric start, establishing the loneliness, isolation, and vast beauty of the Australian Outback, director Russell Mulcahy grapples to make sense of the competing images and themes which recur in this potentially excellent horror movie. It's not a bad film, far from it, but you know it could have been so much better.

The wonderful Bill Kerr plays an Outback hunter, Jake Cullen, whose grandchild is carried off by a giant razorback ... a sort of angst-ridden wild boar with attitude and very bad breath. Partly inspired by the dingo and the disappearing baby case, Mulcahy never adequately resolves this aspect, leaving it as background. Instead, he introduces an American investigative journalist and animal rights campaigner, come to Australia to investigate the widespread slaughter of kangaroos for pet food. When she meets a grizzly, if rather coy end, her husband appears trying to track down his errant wife. The animal rights / eco-warrior themes and allusions, like the disappearing grandchild, now become pretty much redundant.

The husband, instead, enters a "Texas Chainsaw" canning factory and befriends, then alienates the crazies who run it. The film now becomes a chase, with hunted turning hunter, and a fresh love interest injected in the form of Arkie Whiteley. The plot gets just a little too cluttered, yet remains under-developed in places, so the tension and dynamic need to be jump-started from time to time.

Mulcahy (who had previously directed some exotic, not to mention surreal pop videos), gives us a hotch-potch of images while failing to adequately sustain plot or build character. He plays with the visual possibilities of the Outback - the vast skies and spaces, the intense colours, the lighting contrast of shadow and day and night, the variety of landscape ... at times almost lunar, at others reminiscent of the Western Front and trench warfare.

Inspired, in part, by the dingo case, Mulcahy pays lavish tribute to "Jaws" - you find yourself playing spot the influence at times. There are Mad Max style vehicles - ominous armoured confections with lots of spikes and sharp bits. There are macho crazies ... and images of humanity. And there are moments of surprising humour.

But Mulcahy never quite keeps control of the film. It really is excellent in places ... there is so much potential, not least in the roles of Bill Kerr and Arkie Whiteley ... but plot, characters, and themes needed to be handled more thoroughly. In the end, the monster is about as scary as a discarded wig.

This is well worth watching - indeed, you can watch it again and again and still enjoy it. But you are left feeling that this, potentially, was a first class film which somehow escaped - it has some very fine moments, but it's let down by naive plot development and indecisive direction.