Horror Is Your Playground: 100 Bloody Acres, a Dirt-Cheap Delight at 10
One hallmark of horror cinema is a low buy-in. Making horror films is easy: All it takes is a few coffee cans’ worth of squirreled-away dollars and cents to pay for cast, crew and equipment that ranks “basic” in quality. Making good horror films is, of course, harder, but nearly anyone can put up the cash for the chance. This DIY accessibility has helped the genre endure; horror is a wide open theme park where tickets cost only as much as you’ve got in your wallet. Maybe you’re an established name among studios. Maybe you make movies on your dime for the hell of it. Either way, horror is your playground.
Brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes fit more comfortably under the latter designation than the former; between 20 and 30 years ago, they directed, shot and starred in their own short films with non-existent budgets, before finding themselves with around $2 million to play with for their first feature, 100 Bloody Acres. Going from zilch to that is a big leap, at least from the point of view of the people making the shorts. From an industry perspective, $2 million is a pittance. But the Cairnes took that pittance and made one of the best horror films of its year, one of the best Australian horror films of its decade, and the last truly great microbudget horror-comedy, mere moments before the contemporary new wave of horror crested into a full-on renaissance.
That might sound like a distinction so laser-focused as to not be meaningful, and for other genres that sort of question might hold water. But horror, again, is the genre that asks the least and potentially outputs the most, and 100 Bloody Acres is a perfect example of why. If this is what the Cairnes can do after 10 years of tweaking and with half the resources accorded better-known movies in its category, imagine what they might do with more. In 100 Bloody Acres, the Cairnes demonstrate the value of frugal filmmaking, smart production decisions, and harmony between laughter and splatter.
The film is a marvel of black humor and gore, commingling with capitalism, kink and plain old human nastiness in one efficiently-paced package; the Cairnes don’t waste time setting up their narrative, and they don’t let the passage of time dictate their action. The whole film takes place over the well-defined course of a day, starting the minute that Reg Morgan (Damon Herriman) happens upon a car wreck on his way to deliver a load of fertilizer to a waiting client; he steals the driver’s body, motors away, then happens upon three stranded strangers looking for a lift.
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.