★★★★ out of ★★★★★
This Australian offering serves up social satire, gallons of gore gags, and wince-inducing set pieces. It’s a blast, and you’ll even pick up some Aussie slang. Just pass on the sausages, if you are offered any.
Directed by Jesse O’Brien
The Australian horror comedy Two Heads Creek offers a sharply satirical take on anti-immigrant attitudes as well as broadly comic set pieces, along with a smorgasbord of limb-loss and spilled innards. Headed up by strong performances and star Jordan Waller’s clever screenplay, the film is a blood-soaked, laugh-filled good time.
Waller portrays Norman, a Polish butcher in the United Kingdom who is regularly on the receiving end of xenophobic taunts. His model/actress sister Annabelle (Kathryn Wilder) returns home for the wake of their mother, during which they begin to discover that the woman who has died was not their biological mother, and that they are actually Australian, not Polish. The siblings fly to the titular middle-of-nowhere town in Australia to find their real mother, but what they find instead is a backwards group of locals who are dealing with what they perceive as the immigration problem in their own sordid way.
Waller’s screenplay takes digs at both British and Australian anti-immigrant points of view, and it isn’t much of a stretch to think that his skewering applies to many other countries, as well. He keeps the focus on horror and comedy, though, never letting his political satire get overly heavy handed. The citizens of Two Heads Creek — including Helen Dallimore as tour guide Apple, Apple’s husband Noah (Kevin Harrington), and mean-spirited senior Uncle Morris (Don Bridges), who all turn in hilarious performances — are a loony lot, but a scary bunch as well, once the horror reveals start happening. Waller and Wilder have terrific chemistry as siblings who don’t always see eye to eye but still have a close bond. Director Jesse O’Brien (Alien Arrival AKA Arrowhead [2016]) does a superb job balancing humor and horror, and once the kills kick in, it’s a gruesome mess, in the best way, with some crackerjack practical effects on display.
From The Horror Collective, Two Heads Creek is available from June 23 on VOD and On Demand platforms.
Review by Joseph Perry
