Main cast: Audie Duke (Scarlett Lamb), Daniel Roebuck (Garret Wolf Reed), Jessica Sonneborn (Sable), Michael Reed (Griffin), Jim Nieb (Turtle), Reina Hardesty (Kitty), Anton Burman (Tiger), Fred Schuyler (Bear), Barney Burman (Foster), and Douglas Tait (The Hunter)
Director: Barney Burman
From the title Barney Burman’s Wild Boar, I kind of expect Mr Burman to be some big name director, but this is actual his directorial debut, heh. Perhaps he put his name there to avoid potential confusion with other movies also called Wild Boar out there, but looking at the cast members, this one has some noteworthy pedigree thanks to the presence of some B-grade horror staples such as Jessica Sonneborn, Daniel Roebuck, and Audie Duke as well as Douglas Tait, who plays the big scary bad guy in so, so many movies.
The opening scene as Audie Duke’s character emerging from a lake in see-through wet T-shirt and nothing underneath, so yes, this is one of those good old-fashioned low budget flicks that don’t try so hard to be politically correct or polite.
This movie sees Ms Duke’s character, Scarlett Lamb, and a bunch of dead people walking doing something called “geocaching”, which is a treasure hunt thing involving the use of GPS. Well, fat good that GPS will do them, as they will stumble from this world into another by accident, one where a nuclear disaster had wiped out pretty much all of humanity and the pigs had evolved to become upright, two-legged scavengers in the resulting wasteland of a world. A few of them stumble upon the humans, and are not amused. Heads, and more, will roll…
Folks that ordered gore and mayhem will find that this one serves them up with style. The special effects can be goofy at times, but there is a cheerful exuberance in the carnage taking place on screen that I can’t help but to be charmed by the whole thing.
Those looking for fanservice will also be charmed, I believe, by the willingness of the leading ladies to rise to the occasion, for the want of a better expression. Sadly for those that prefer fanservice of the male persuasion, there is none here unless one has a fetish for fat or unkempt or buffoon sorts.
Unfortunately, this movie also suffers from some typical low budget indie horror issues. Too much time is devoted to characters that have barely any claim to the word “characters” interacting and behaving like morons. Who cares? More time should have been spent on killing these annoying turds slowly and graphically.
I know, it’s cheaper to film twenty minutes of ten people awkwardly talking and wandering around, compared to scenes involving costumes and special effects, but come on. There is hardly any character development here, so why would I care what these people talk and do? I am here to see them get killed, so stop boring me and go straight to the butchery please.
Because of this, the movie ends up serving long stretches of boredom-inducing moments interspersed by moments of fun butchery and disembowelment. It’s an unevenly paced movie, in other words.
I appreciate how this movie simultaneously pays homage and satirizes more established movies in the genres it straddles: Mad Max is an obvious one, but it also salutes cult horror classics such as Creepozoids and trashy low-budget flicks of the dystopian kind. I suppose that it having the same issues as those cult classics, such as spotty pacing and dodgy effects, only adds to its charm.
Hence, I’m torn about Barney Burman’s Wild Boar. I personally won’t want to watch this one again, as it is nowhere as gory and bloody as I’d have liked to make up for the other issues present. However, it also manages to capture perfectly well the vibe and the tone of those movies from the trashy, glorious video rental horror staple days, and I can’t help but to warm up to it for that. I know, it’s probably nostalgia goggles I’m wearing, but these days, even with Shudder offering a watch-all-you-can-eat buffet for a monthly subscription, there is an air of unapologetic awfulness and rawness that isn’t present anymore in most of the horror flicks these days.
Anyway, all things considered, I won’t say that this movie is a qualified success, but at the same time, it’s a memorable flick nonetheless despite its issues. Three oogies sounds about right for this one.
