Main cast: Damon Herriman (Reg Morgan), Angus Sampson (Lindsay Morgan), Anna McGahan (Sophie), Oliver Ackland (James), Jamie Kristian (Wes), and Chrissie Page (Nancy)
Directors: Cameron and Colin Cairnes
100 Bloody Acres is marketed as an Australian-brewed horror comedy thing, although the villains here are very human. There is very little scare here, to be honest, as the whole thing is more of a Kiwi version of Fargo than The Hills Have Eyes.
Sophie, James, and Wes are three tourists whose vehicle breaks down while they are on their way to the Stockport music festival. Actually, there is drama brewing among all three. Sophie is engaged to James, but she is sleeping with Wes mostly because she can’t stand James anymore and she sort of neglects to tell James that. James is a friend of Wes, but he’s secretly jealous of that man, who has traveled the globe, seen and done everything, and even shaved his pubes. But all the silly drama has to wait when Sophie manages to get Reg Morgan to give them a ride in his truck.
Reg and his brother produce and sell high grade fertilizer… ground from corpses that Reg picks up from accidents and such before the cops show up. James and Wes sit at the back of the truck while Sophie and Reg discover at the front that they have, unexpectedly, plenty in common. When the two men at the back discover the corpse that Reg has picked up earlier that day, and Reg decides to take all of them back to the farm so that he and his brother can determine what to do with them, that’s when the fun starts. I’m sure you can imagine what Lindsay, the older brother, has in store for the three. Can Sophie use Reg’s developing attraction to her to convince him to let them go? It’s pretty clear that Lindsay has a hold over Reg, so can Reg muster the courage to go against him?
This movie has its charms. None of the characters are particularly likable, but there is some fascinating chemistry between Reg and Sophie that makes sense despite how wrong the whole thing seems on paper. The ending scene is one for the poetry books, because it’s exactly the kind of the closure that these two deserve. Reg is pretty amusing as someone who is not exactly altogether upstairs but at the same time can be mean and cruel for the sake of what he feels is right – grounding corpses into fertilizer is, in fact, his idea.
“We’re not psychos, alright? We’re small business operators!”
Sophie can be just as twisted like that too. Meanwhile, James is an amusing kind of annoyance, while Wes may be pretty but he’s a spectacularly dumb thing who does all kinds of stupid things when he’s high – making him a memorable kind of punchline in this movie.
However, the movie doesn’t feel as developed as it could have been. A big reason is probably due to Lindsay being a rather dull villain despite Angus Sampson’s menacing glare and growl – he never feels like a credible threat to anyone, and the movie never has a pay-off that satisfies as a result. In many ways, Reg seems like a more frightening villain, mostly because he is more unpredictable than Lindsay – the only reason he doesn’t want to kill Sophie (he actually can’t care less about the two men) is because he likes her. He has no problems at all grounding people into fertilizer as long as these people are already dead, and he has no issues with killing people to get the corpses.
At the end of the day, I like Reg and Sophie, Some of the dark and morbid lines here make me laugh. But the movie feels shorter than it is due to its rather anticlimactic denouement, and I feel that a lot of things here could be made a little more gripping or hard hitting. 100 Bloody Acres is perfectly fine for a morbid afternoon watch, but I wish that it has been a little more memorable. As it is, it’s a little too lightweight for its own good.
