‘Jaws’ Summer is Not Over Until You Watch ‘Razorback’
On Labor Day weekend, Jaws fans will get the cherry on top of what’s been deemed “Jaws Summer” when Steven Spielberg’s classic wraps up its months-long 50th anniversary celebrations with a theatrical re-release. It’s a fitting end to a summer full of tributes to one of the greatest horror films ever made, but if you ask me, a summer of Jaws wouldn’t be truly complete without watching a few of the film’s many imitators.
Spielberg’s success reignited the animal attack subgenre of horror in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Beginning with Piranha in 1978 and arguably continuing all the way up to Arachnophobia in 1990, we got dozens of movies attempting to capitalize on the Jaws phenomenon. It’s a very fun wave of movies to explore, and everyone has their favorites. For me, though, it was never better than 1984’s Razorback, one of the greatest Australian horror films ever made.
As the title suggests, Razorback is to giant wild boars what Jaws is to great white sharks, but Russell Mulcahy’s film is never content to coast on the traditional beats of the animal attack story. Those beats are there, of course, beginning with a horrific opening kill and continuing all the way through the 91-minute runtime, but Razorback is special because of what happens between those beats. Instead of a by-the-numbers natural horror piece, this film transforms into a hallucinogenic, often flat-out operatic struggle between man and nature, and reveals both sides to be monstrous in their own way.
After a prologue scene that sets up the title monster, the film flashes forward two years, as American reporter Beth (Judy Winters) heads into the Australian outback to report on wildlife, like kangaroos being slaughtered and ground up for pet food at a horrifying local factory. Once there, she meets Jake Cullen (Bill Kerr), a local hunter who’s become something of a pariah since the death of his grandson two years earlier. Jake has always claimed that a massive razorback ripped his house to shreds and took the boy, but since no one’s been able to spot or kill the beast in the years since, no one believes him, and few are willing to listen, at least until Beth shows up.
So, when the reporter goes missing, Jake reluctantly teams up with her husband Carl (Gregory Harrison) and fellow outback-dweller Sarah (Arkie Whiteley) to solve the mystery and, hopefully, kill the razorback.
Right away, a lot of Jaws ingredients jump out here. You’ve got the grizzled hunter standing in for Quint, and the out-of-his-depth, frightened hero to stand in for Brody. You’ve even got point-of-view shots to open the film and emphasize the menacing specter of an animal we haven’t yet seen with our own eyes. If you’re an animal attack movie fan, it has all the right ingredients, and it even layers in social commentary, subbing in animal rights and environmentalism for Jaws‘ politics of safety. But these are all things you might expect from this era of nature horror, so what is it that really sets Razorback apart?
First of all, this movie is gorgeous. Mulcahy, who would go on to direct Highlander two years later, got his start in music videos and uses those skills to imbue Razorback with an almost mystical visual palette. The opening attack, which claims Jake’s grandson, feels like The Evil Dead by way of Mad Max, and as the film goes on, Mulcahy whips the elements of the outback into a frenzy, conjuring a world where the wind might knock you over, the darkness has teeth, and beasts of mythic proportions lurk just out of frame. It is a stunner of a movie, and you can easily get lost just looking at it.
But Razorback is also interested, in a way that many other films of its kind aren’t, in juxtaposition human monstrousness with the brutality of the animal kingdom. Jaws, Piranha, and the like all have their human villains as well, but in Razorback, the enemy is not a singular human threat. It’s humanity itself, a cold and indifferent collection of warm bodies who shrug in the face of violence and abuse because the world they know is full of it all the time.
Mulcahy’s effortlessly beautiful shots are contrasted with graphic depictions of the pet food factory, a meat grinder that chews up everything in its path, reminding us that, as deadly as the razorback might be, the humans in its habitat are often much colder and more sinister. It’s not a preachy film by any means, but it is a film that asks us to question everything we think we know about this particular subgenre, because it never lets up in its conviction that the title creature is not the only monster here.
Razorback will never be Jaws. Spielberg’s film is lightning in a bottle in a way that few films are, a landmark of craft and timing and atmosphere that still haunts us 50 years later. But among the Jaws successors, Razorback stands alone as a beast all its own, full of bombast and fury and jaw-dropping visuals. If you’re still celebrating Jaws Summer, you owe it to yourself to watch Razorback as well, because it represents the fullest and most rewarding outgrowth of the Jaws phenomenon, and it’s a damn entertaining movie all on its own.
Razorback is streaming on Hoopla, free to watch with a library card.
Categorized: Editorials
