What’s an Australian horror film about backpackers getting savagely murdered by insane hunters to do to free themselves of the long shadow of Greg McLean’s 2005 film Wolf Creek ? Up the gore? Possibly, although the “head on a stick” scene would be pretty tough to top without surrendering to Braindead levels of slapstick carnage. Double down on the nihilism? Again, possible, but unlikely. How do you top the killer winning and getting released scot-free by the police? Damien Power arrived at a different solution with his film Killing Ground: formalist experimentation. It begins with Ian and Samantha (Ian Meadows, Harriet Dyer)—a unassuming white-bread couple that wouldn’t feel out of place catching Sunday morning brunch with Brad Majors and Janet Weiss—arriving at a national park for a weekend of camping. They discover the abandoned remains of another camping party as well as a severely dehydrated toddler passed out in the forest. Elsewhere, a family toting around a moody teenage daughter with severe nightmares begins their own ill-fated camping trip. And elsewhere still, two scummy, creepy-looking hunters named Chook and German (Aaron Glenane, Aaron Pedersen) scout out bars for drunken pick-ups, all the while making eyes at underage women and muttering about not going to prison.
Obviously these three story lines are out of chronological order and all tell the same story. And it’s almost endearing how McLean treats his narrative flourishes with the enthusiasm of a wide-eyed film school student. But they do little to distract from Killing Ground being a sub-par, uninspired bit of violent misery. After the three storylines converge, we get the usual cavalcade of rape scenes, torture, and slaughter one would expect.
The one moment of brilliance comes in a scene where two of the unfortunate campers are bound and gagged, tied to trees, and made unwilling participants in a lively recreation of the William Tell legend. But there’s nothing else to distinguish it from other wannabe torture porn. There’s not enough of a political or moral statement for it to be interesting to critical viewers and not enough blood and guts to satisfy the gore-hounds. Even the villains aren’t particularly memorable. Glenane and Pedersen do their damnedest to come off as intimidating and psychotic; Pedersen in particular really strains to pull off the whole soft-spoken crazy-eyed persona while Glenane seems content with the mentally slow, emotionally stunted trailer-trash shtick. Ho-hum. They’re no more interesting than this film’s tired premise.
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