FrightFest ’18: Boar
***/****
starring Simone Buchanan, John Jarratt, Melissa Tkautz, Bill Moseley
written and directed by Chris Sun
by Walter Chaw Chris Sun doesn't appear to have any boundaries, at least when it comes to violence and gore in his movies; over the course of four films, he's proven himself to be a vital voice in splatter/exploitation. He dealt with cultures of masculine toxicity in Come and Get Me and pedophilia and vengeance in Daddy's Little Girl, before hewing closer to the genre line with a straight inexorable-killer slasher flick (the ferocious Charlie's Farm) and, now, eco-horror, with his really fun Boar. An odd, mostly inappropriate comparison can be made to the Coens' early career, in which it seemed like they were trying to cover every genre in turn: Here's this guy knocking off horror subgenres with films tied to each other only by their grisly extremes. Eco-horror was popular in the United States in the immediate aftermath of Jaws, because films like Grizzly and John Frankenheimer's Prophecy could be pitched simply as "Jaws in the…" The trend peaked with Australian Russell Mulcahy's Razorback, featuring almost impressionistic work from The Road Warrior DP Dean Semler. Mulcahy's film is unexpectedly artful, almost lyrical in parts, until the end when it pays out in nihilism. For my money, of the two mid-Eighties releases inspired by the death of Azaria Chamberlain, the infant who was carried off by dingoes, it's better than the one that sticks to the facts (A Cry in the Dark).