Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.
When Spielberg made Jaws, he changed a great deal of things in the movie industry. The first thing he did was create the idea of the summer blockbuster. Whether that has been for good or ill I leave up to the individual. The other thing Spielberg did was create a series of Jaws knock-off films involving other elements of nature going berserk. These sorts of stories certainly existed before Spielberg. The ‘50s were rife with giant insect and creature films. But Jaws gave use a world where the reality didn’t need to be changed; it was just a really big shark. From that we got movies like Grizzly and Piranha, and we still get them in films like Anaconda and Lake Placid. Razorback, from the mid-‘80s, is an Australian Jaws that replaces the shark with several tons of aggravated and presumably delicious wild pre-bacon.
The film starts with our introduction to the creature. Kangaroo hunter Jake Cullen (Bill Kerr) is watching his grandson when his house is literally run through by the razorback in question. It runs off with the child, presumably to eat it. What follows is a trial where Jake is found not guilty because of a lack of evidence, but has his reputation and life destroyed. In no small part, this feels like the story of dingoes running off with a baby that led to A Cry in the Dark.
