Main cast: Jordan Waller (Norman), Kathryn Wilder (Annabelle), Helen Dallimore (Apple), Kevin Harrington (Noah), Stephen Hunter (Clive), Don Bridges (Uncle Morris), Madelaine Nunn (Daisy), David Adlam (Eric), Gregory J Fryer (Apari), Gary Sweet (Hans), and Kerry Armstrong (Mary Pearce)
Director: Jesse O’Brien
In order to pass itself off as something interesting, Two Heads Creek spoils itself with the movie poster and opening credits: there are cannibals here. The presence of cannibals is a spoiler because my god, the first hour or so of this movie is more like an unfunny comedy featuring really tired stereotypes of everyone and everything.
Jordan Waller, who wrote the script and made himself the star of the show, is one of the many white people in the entertainment industry these days that think they are experts in injecting politics and social statements into everything they do—only to do so in such a heavy-handed, clumsy, and hammy manner that they may as well take a pig’s carcass and smack it across their audience’s face while screaming, “Look at how woke I am!” I have nothing against political statements in entertainment, but please, at least do it in a way that is still entertaining if not thought-provoking.
Norman and Annabelle are twins that have gone separate ways for a bit. He takes over their late mother’s butcher business, despite being pretty terrible at it, while she heads off to pursue a career in acting and modeling, only to have her biggest gig to date as the face of a brand of laxative. Meanwhile, because they are Polish living in a post-Brexit UK where, in the minds of people like Mr Waller that are upset that they are no longer invited to the fanciest parties of EU, there are locals constantly vandalizing Norman’s shop and yelling at him to go back to Poland.
Seriously, Jordan Waller and his co-star Kathryn Wilder are two of the whitest-looking people around, and they want to play the oppressed victims of racism from other white people. What, they are too woke to, I don’t know, let people of color play the roles of Norman and Annabelle?
Anyway, while packing away their mother’s things, Annabelle finds a postcard that reveals how they are actually adopted; their biological mother handed them to the woman that had recently passed on, and the postcard came from a place called Two Heads Creek in Australia. Now, you may say, “See! Norman and Annabelle are actually Australians, so it makes sense that they are played by two of the whitest people ever!” To which I will say, “Yes, because everyone in Australia is white.”
Anyway, the two head off to visit that place, only to soon learn that Australia is an even worse crap hole than post-Brexit UK. You see, not only is Two Heads Creek populated by every cringe-inducing, outdated stereotypes of the fat, ugly, trashy, dumb, and likely inbred white people ever, they are also abetted by the immigration folks of Australia, the latter sending freshly-arrived immigrants off the boat to this place. The immigrants have no idea that they will end up on the dining table of these folks.
Regardless of where I stand on the issue of Brexit and immigration, it will not change the fact that this movie is a colossal bore. Mr Waller’s script relies on tired stereotypes that have been done to death already, and in his eagerness to portray how much a better person he is than those other stinky fellow white people of his, he also shows how little he really thinks of the people he is supposedly championing. Despite having a Vietnamese character chastising Annabelle for assuming that she’s Chinese, all the Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, whatever characters here are tarred with the same overdone brush: they are all brainy to the point of being literal and unable to see the obvious, they all love to snap pictures with their phones non-stop, and without the white saviors to tell them what to do, they are all easy prey for the bad guys. Oh, and surprise, the sole dark-skinned character here talks only about how white people are keeping the natives down.
As a result of this, everyone in this movie is a stereotype—the Magic Dark-Skinned Native, the Stupidly Literal Pale-Skinned Asian, the Ugly and Fat Dumb Inbred White Hick, et cetera. Color me cynical but it sure looks like only Mr Waller and his leading co-star are allowed to be the only conventionally attractive characters in this movie. He doesn’t want to be just the white savior of oppressed victims of color; he wants to be the hot white savior.
The jokes are all flat, and everything about this movie feels like it is desperately trying to emulate better satirical horror movies of this sort—both the original and remade Two Thousand Maniacs! come to mind—and for way too long, the story isn’t going anywhere at all. It’s just Norman and Annabelle gawking at the unfunny antics of the inbred hillbillies, with a couple of by the numbers jump scares tossed here and there. Even when things pick up, the gore is pretty unimaginative too. Folks that want gore committed by hillbillies may as well watch the first two Wrong Turn movies: they look like masterpieces compared to this turd.
Two Heads Creek is, all in all, an unfunny patchwork of played-out stereotypes, limp jokes, and eye-rolling overacting that seems to have nary a brain cell spent on making sure that its efforts at being a political satire as well as a horror comedy are done with even a little amount of intelligence or creativity. All it ends up saying is that we should leave the making of political satires and horror comedies to the actual experts.
