FrightFest VOD film review: Two Heads Creek
Review Overview
Whingeing Poms
7Feral Aussies
7Bloody immigrant politics
7Anton Bitel | On 08, Sep 2020
Director: Jesse O’Brien
Cast: Jordan Waller, Kathryn Wilder, Helen Dallimore, Kevin Harrington, Stephen Hunter, Don Bridges, Madelaine Nunn, David Adlam
Certificate: 18
Watch Two Heads Creek online in the UK: Apple TV (iTunes) / Prime Video (Buy/Rent) / TalkTalk TV / Rakuten TV / Google Play / Sky Store
“Horror movie right there on my TV”, run the lyrics to Australian rock band Skyhooks’ 1975 hit Horror Movie, heard three times (including a wildly choreographed karaoke version) over the course of Two Heads Creek. The truth is that much of the horror in Jesse O’Brien’s feature really is of the ripped-from-the-headlines variety, reflecting issues we see on the news everyday – although that bitter pill is sugared by comedy that is often broader than the accents of these grotesque characters.
The politics are there from the start, as, against the backdrop of open hostility to foreigners in Brexit-happy Slough, emasculated butcher Norman (Jordan Waller, also the screenwriter) and his twin sister Annabelle (Kathryn Wilder) – a vegan actress – must face the double whammy of their Polish mother’s death, and of the news that she was not in fact their real mother at all. So they fly off to remote Two Heads Creek in Queensland, in search of their lost mother Mary Pearce (apparently named after one of the prominent Dreamlanders of John Waters – in keeping with the film’s hyperbolically campy tone).
At first, this rural backwater appears to be the polar opposite of insular Britain: the quaint denizens of Two Heads Creek welcome busloads of (Asian) immigrants with open arms. Yet the sibling tourists will discover not only their own messy legacy, but also a meat-loving village that is a microcosm of White Australia’s worst qualities – and that harbours some very dark secrets.
“This country is fucked,” Annabelle concludes – although one of the joys of Two Heads Creek, when it is not riffing on the big knives of Crocodile Dundee, the suspicious barbecue of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the errant mother love of Psycho, the “nice chianti” of The Silence of the Lambs and the family revelations of the Star Wars saga, is the complementary (but barely complimentary) common ground that it finds between Aussies and “Pommy bastards”: both love cricket, both are oppressive of Indigenous populations and both are deeply xenophobic.
Ultimately, the films wavers between the comic rural slaughter of 100 Bloody Acres and satire of Antipodean bigotry in Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek 2. (One of the film’s running jokes is that, despite all the masculine posturing on display, these families are essentially matriarchies, with weak men always being outclassed and outdone by much stronger women.)
“Anyone see a right wingnut?” asks one of the locals as he tries to repair the town’s second-hand meat-grinder after it breaks down. In fact rightwing nuts are everywhere to be seen here, as Two Heads Creek skewers the horrific absurdities of anti-immigrant politics, both Up Over and Down Under.