A patchy but likeably slapdash indie combination of 80’s slasher parody, broad Australian-British culture clash and slapstick crudity, this movie is engagingly performed but suffers from the fact that its one joke is contained within its title : it’s the world’s first cricket-based slasher movie. It’s an amusing joke, admittedly, and does result in genuine laughs, though co-directors Edmonds and Turner (who also did pretty much everything else behind the scenes) struggle to sustain it at feature length, with haphazard editing resulting in some scenes lasting way beyond their natural length.
Two decades ago, a much-bullied kid suffered a life-scarring extended towel-whipping at the hands of his boys’ school cricket team. In the present day, he’s a scarred, moustache-sporting “pommie bastard psycho” who, in cricket garb, has notched up a series of cricket-themed killings. Prim British detective inspector Stacey Edmonds teams up with a stereotypically snobbish, chauvinist Oz cop (Jai Koutrae) to reunite the original cricket team and finger the suspect. Not literally.
Not afraid to be genuinely nasty despite setting itself up as a full-blown parody, the film is at its most entertaining (just like the failed STUDENT BODIES almost three decades earlier, which this sometimes resembles) during its knowingly absurd, riotously gruesome kill scenes. Just about every possible cricket-themed murder you can think of is dramatized here with enthusiasm : multiple impalements with sharpened stumps, slashings with razor-fingered cricket gloves, hurled spiked balls and, in a movie highlight, a ball-box riddled with nails. The movie’s keen sense of its own absurdity and its fondness for OTT gore result in satisfyingly splashy deaths (disembowelment, eye gouging) and a series of slapstick fight scenes, though it’s never as inventive with its non existent budget as the early Peter Jackson flicks it sometimes aspires to.
The flashback-laden back-story and twin-sister plot twist offer cute narrative echoes of traditional slasher clichés, and the co-directors have fun with other familiar tropes including subjective camerawork, death-after-sex, back-from-the-dead shocks, contrived fake scares and an amusingly protracted, gratuitous shower scene (which, with its obvious lingering body-double nudity, masturbation and crotch shots, spoofs DRESSED TO KILL). DePalma’s penchant for split-screen suspense set-ups is parodied, there’s an overt homage to ALIENS and one of the best (if most obvious) gags revives the old chestnut whereby the striding killer easily catches up with a swiftly scurrying victim. (In a nice riff on slasher standards, a nearly-nude chubby middle aged man is chased through the woods at one point by the advancing killer).
The low production values sometimes give the film the unwelcome look and feel of a Troma production, though there are flashes of style and even mildly creepy moments of the killer looming out of the dark background of shots like Michael Myers in the original HALLOWEEN. Too often the script struggles to be witty (“That’s so fuckin’ un-Australian!” is a minor dialogue highlight) and sometimes it strains too hard for laughs (Edmonds quotes Steven Seagal in UNDER SIEGE at one point to unamusing effect) but, for all its flaws, this is still a fun flick
-Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
