Horror Is Your Playground: 100 Bloody Acres, a Dirt-Cheap Delight at 10

Like the Cairnes’ latest, Late Night with the Devil, a monster of a film that turned heads last March at SXSW, 100 Bloody Acres is about bad choices made in the pursuit of success. The movie’s sole running gag revolves around a radio ad for Reg’s business, which he co-runs with his brother, Lindsay (Angus Sampson) – a simple jingle about the quality of their fertilizer blend. When Reg steals the corpse, he means to please Lindsay and replicate the success of their most recent blend, made from the mangled bodies of charity volunteers who crashed down the road from the Morgans’ farm. It isn’t exactly a victimless crime, but the guy’s already dead. (Only it turns out he isn’t, and his last words before he takes a header into the brothers’ grinder are hilarious in a grim, oblivious way.) 

Munching up living people is another story. When Reg lets Sophie (Anna McGahan), her boyfriend James (Oliver Ackland), and Wes (James Kristian), James’ best friend as well as Sophie’s hot affair, hitch a ride in his truck, he does so against his better judgment, because Anna is comely and friendly and Reg is something of a soft-hearted man-child. Lindsay is made from sterner stuff, plus a heft chunk of cruelty, made clear both by his abuse of Reg and his outcome flow chart. According to Lindsay’s chemical tests, the driver produced top-tier fertilizer material, which in turn suggests that Anna, James, and Wes will also produce top-tier fertilizer material. The three have already found out about the missing volunteers, so Lindsay and Reg might have to kill them anyway; might as well get some good bend out of it. 

All of this unfolds with limber rhythm, a plot driven by purpose and motivated by character. Part of the joy in 100 Bloody Acres is the ultra-carnage, because there is no good way to feed a human being into a crusher without making a mess. Unlike other hillbilly horror films, the mess is a punchline, like Reg’s ill-fated attempt to save and reassure the driver when he wakes up mid-pulping. Harriman plays Reg as squirrely, Lindsay’s unconfident shadow – the Australian outback’s version of a nebbish. If he had his way, Anna would fall madly in love with him, James and Wes would be surprisingly understanding about the turn of events, and Lindsay would figure out how to make a great blend without people as the first ingredient. Reg can’t have his way. 

The character’s tragicomic arc informs most of 100 Bloody Acres’ humor – Kristian embraces Wes as an amoral good-time slacker, and he kills with a selection of one-liners – but the Cairnes’ maximization of resources informs its entire structure. No moment passes that doesn’t influence the plot, or the characters, or the atmosphere, and it’s this sense of craftsmanship that lets the Cairnes get by with minimal funds at their disposal. Accepting that the money isn’t there to fire up the grinder more than a couple of times, they invest in Reg and Lindsay, Anna, James, and Wes, in the brothers’ neighbor, Nancy (Chrissie Page), and in the local cop, Burke (John Jarratt), instead. The tension in 100 Bloody Acres derives from whether or not, and how soon, everyone else will catch on about the secret to the Morgans’ success, and how the Morgans will respond individually and as brothers when they do. Here, human behavior rather than a kill count constitutes “action,” which makes the kills land with a jolt when they do happen and also enhances the Cairnes’ grim abattoir comedy. For them, scarcity ups their filmmaking.

Plenty of horror comedies have come and gone since 100 Bloody Acres’ 2013 U.S. release; the films of Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day, Freaky) and Josh Ruben (Scare Me, Werewolves Within) come to mind, along with Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Ready or Not, McG’s Babysitter films, Tommy Wirkola’s The Trip, Casey Tebo’s Black Friday, or, more recently, Emily Hagins’ Sorry About the Demon. But most of these budgetarily outmatch 100 Bloody Acres, and others amount to dirt on the Cairnes’ bootheels. The films that come closest to match it in a marriage of thriftiness with creative outcome – Gerard Johnstone’s Housebound and Shin’ichirō Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead – are modern classics, too, but even they fall short of 100 Bloody Acres’ economical wonders. 100 Bloody Acres funnels everything $2 million affords it into a tight window, spinning an afternoon in its characters’ lives into a nightmarish comedy of errors. Even a decade after its premiere, horror hasn’t produced another movie quite like it.

Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can follow him on Twitter and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.