Peter Bradshaw 

Two Heads Creek review – outback gore-fest bites off more than it can chew

Aussie attitudes to immigration are the target of bloody satire in a horror-comedy that eventually gets stuck without a paddle
  
  

Two Heads Creek
Hostile environment … Two Heads Creek. Photograph: Andrew Railton

This is a horror comedy whose two constituent genres, like so much else in this style, cancel each other out: too funny to be scary and yet not funny enough to be funny. Two Heads Creek shows up like a would-be Ozploitation shocker and it’s lively enough, it hangs together and the anti-racist intentions are there. The screenwriter and star is Jordan Waller (who played Randolph Churchill in Darkest Hour).

He is Norman, a nervous guy adopted at birth by a Polish woman in Britain along with his uptight sister Annabelle (Kathryn Wilder). Now grown up, the siblings have to deal with anti-Polish abuse from the locals and when they hear their birth mother was Australian they jump at the chance to meet her in her gruesomely named home town in the outback: Two Heads Creek.

They soon discover horrible things are going on, not unconnected with bigotry of the sort they’d hoped to leave behind: the movie riffs cheerfully on the Australian government’s international reputation for providing immigrants with what a former British prime minister called a “hostile environment”. The chopping and the splattering and the fine blood spray over appalled faces begins and the movie is targeted at a customer base who believe that this kind of thing is just automatically hilarious.

They are things I find unhilarious and the all-important context here makes no difference to the unhilarity. Walker and Wilder sell it gamely enough – but it’s the sort of movie you need to smoke your body weight in weed to enjoy.

• Two Heads Creek is released on digital platforms on 7 September.

 

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