Review by Ben Bussey
I just don’t get it. Here’s a new Australian horror movie, relatively low-budget but with reasonable means at its disposal: IMDb lists its reported budget as $3 million (presumably AUS), which was enough to hire the services of three well-known, long-established Hollywood actors, and produce an end product that looks and sounds pretty damn good. Clearly a lot of real effort has been put in here. My question is why? Why would anyone invest a considerable amount of time, energy and not for nothing money into something as lazily conceived, painfully generic and downright tedious as Charlie’s Farm?
Look, I do enjoy the odd dirty backwoods hillbilly horror on occasion, and I realise there’s a strong direct-to-DVD market for it; the Wrong Turn series wouldn’t have endured so long otherwise. But you know, it hasn’t been that long since the last Wrong Turn, and there’s said to be another one – the seventh – on the way. Whether anyone really wants or needs yet another Wrong Turn is debatable (and I think I know where I’d stand in that debate), but one thing I can confidently declare we don’t need is yet another by-the-numbers rural slasher following every cliche to the letter, presenting two-dimensional characters spouting utterly witless dialogue, throwing in side characters in the most forced and arbitrary way imaginable, and ultimately delivering basically nothing that even the most casual horror viewer hasn’t seen innumerable times before.
Seriously, Charlie’s Farm makes the Hatchet films look like a hotbed of innovation. Just take a moment to contemplate that.
The plot, such as it bears repeating (well, it has been repeated time and again, and again, and again), centres on four well-to-do youngish folk (two girls and two boys, of course) who, having no apparent responsibilities, decide out of the blue to take a camping trip – and the boys decide, without telling the girls at first, that they’ll track down Charlie’s Farm, the reported site of a string of murders by deranged backwoods farmers around 30 years earlier. Recalling tidbits of the urban legends surrounding the place as they make their way down, the city folk are warned by the locals to abandon their foolish quest, and the girls – who are the sensible, sensitive ones, of course – urge the boys to reconsider. Obviously they don’t. Obviously they find the place. Obviously it looks like a leftover set from any number of Texas Chainsaw Massacre copycats. Obviously Charlie himself (Aussie muscleman Nathan Jones) eventually shows up – after about an hour – and obviously he’s a towering brick shithouse who brutally and cartoonishly kills them all one by one. The end. Obviously.
I dunno; maybe it’s a generational thing. Maybe writer-director Chris Sun is banking on his film reaching a young audience who are not remotely versed in backwoods slasher lore, much as Scream provided an introduction to slashers for the hitherto clueless teens of the 1990s. There’s a moment when an extremely crap joke is made about Charles Manson (to be fair, I think it’s intended to be crap), and one character asks who he is; and as hard as that might be for many of us to believe, it may well be that a lot of young folk today honestly don’t know. Perhaps for them Charlie’s Farm might prove a revelation; perhaps this is why Sun would seem to have gone to pains to follow the conventions of the genre as closely as possible, with so far as I can tell no effort made whatsoever to do anything remotely original, with the possible exception of one or two of the death scenes.
But I rather doubt that’s the case, as they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of getting cameos from Kane Hodder and Bill Moseley (sigh; remember the days when his presence made a film worth seeing?) if they hadn’t intended to sell Charlie’s Farm to existing, knowledgeable horror fans. Now, both these men have played some pretty substandard parts in their time, but these really just take the biscuit. First off, there’s very little explanation of why either of them is in Australia (not that I can hold that against them too harshly, as Americans emigrating down under obviously isn’t unheard of), but the characters themselves – yeesh. Moseley really can do this hillbilly psycho schtick in his sleep, and honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if they woke him mere seconds before he had to shoot his scenes as it’s the same routine as ever, only with an excess of subpar dialogue, and a tied up semi-naked victim screaming at him from the bed. We know he raped her, because she shouts about it, more than once.
But as bog-standard and half-baked as Moseley’s cameo is, that’s nothing compared to how lazily and stupidly they shoehorn Kane Hodder into this thing. Okay, he’s a good guy, which is a surprise – but that’s where the good news ends. Introduced maybe half an hour in out of nowhere as an American boxer our kids are somehow close friends with, who apparently knows something about the Charlie legend, he then disappears until the final act when – prompted by nothing – he gets worried about his young friends and decides to go down to the farm and check on them. And the journey that took them more than a day takes him about ten minutes. Obviously it’s all a set-up for Kane and Charlie to fight, which is a laudable enough goal – but quite apart from the painfully lame-brained set-up to this fight, worse yet is the fact that they opted to shoot it in a dingy, dimly-lit barn with close-up camera work, meaning we can basically see bugger all once the fight kicks off. Yet another instance where I just can’t fathom what the filmmakers were thinking.
And Tara Reid… yeah, she’s just boring, but surely no-one’s expecting anything different.
There are some damn good low budget genre directors doing interesting and unusual work in Australia right now. Off the top of my head, Dario Russo’s Danger 5 gave us 14 episodes of the most unique, outlandish TV of recent years; Daniel Armstrong has blended 80s-style horror with roller derby in Murderdrome, and female wrestling in the upcoming From Parts Unknown; and Stuart Simpson has gone from homaging Russ Meyer and 50s B-movies in Monstro to tackling Taxi Driver-esque psychological drama with Chocolate Strawberry Vanilla (which, although I had my reservations, was a very respectable effort). When I think what any of these guys might be able to do with $3 million in their pocket, and then look at what Chris Sun and company have done with that money… let me say it once more, I just don’t get it. Are people really that eager to see the same thing over and over? Charlie’s Farm not only makes no attempts whatsoever to do anything new, it seems to positively revel in its complete and total lack of originality. I’ve searched and searched for any hint of satire or subversion, any vague chance that the film might be trying to make some kind of point by going through the motions so deliberately, taking no risks of any kind along the way… but I’ve drawn a complete blank at every step, and can only conclude that Charlie’s Farm is nothing more than a complete and total waste of time.
Charlie’s Farm is available on UK Blu-ray and DVD on 22nd June, from Monster Pictures.