No.165 : The Babadook (2014)

The Babadook at the IMDb

Essie Davis stars as an Australian widow batting with a monster and an annoying six year old son who does magic tricks.

We open with our heroine, Amelia, having a few out of body experience involving a car crash and a man. She awakes from what is a dream by her shouty son, Samuel. Samuel is a handful to say the least what with all his monster sightings and his elaborate machines for attacking them.

His monster alerts are written off as a product of his over active imagination, but we’ve seen the poster!

One night he asks to be read from an unfamiliar book called ‘Mr Babadook’. This book has creepy illustrations and promises that the reader will end up dead - ‘The World’s Diggiest Dog’ this is not! Samuel is rightfully scared by the book but Mum’s patience starts to wear thin when he starts spotting the Babadook all over the place.

Small signs start to appear that suggest things are not right such as doors opening and glass in the soup. Amelia speculates that Samuel is the cause of the upsets but soon changes her tune when she starts to see the Babadook herself.

As her world slowly crumbles and with the social workers at the door we have to wonder if the monster is real or if Mum is just plain nuts.

This is an interesting psychological horror that has a cracking performance from Essie Davis at it’s heart. The boy; not so much! She starts off well as a struggling widow but slowly descends into a haze of mental instability and curse words. Some scenes are genuinely uncomfortable as she berates her son and sorts out the dog for one woof too many.

It’s left deliberately unclear as to whether the Babadook is real or just a symptom of Amelia’s mental state. Even when he’s seen it’s often just a flash or immediately followed by the character waking up, so you are unclear if it’s a dream or not.

The design is great with the original story book monster wonderfully realised in jerky animations on screen. I liked it when Mum was eventually possessed, that she too had the same staccato movements as the evil Mr B.

The struggles faced by Amelia were well realised with her bitchy and insensitive fellow Mums being no use and the prospective boyfriend being scared off by the screaming Samuel - and no wonder.

The po-faced authority fugues such as the police and the social workers were no help at all and the whole thing was a great essay on isolation and the struggles faced by young widows who face real monsters wearing hats.

There were the usual false starts and jump scares, but it was good how the pretences were dropped after an hour or so and the film became a struggle for survival. It wasn’t always clear if this struggle was in Amelia’s head or with a real monster but the resolution was well handled with the colour palette brightening up in the last scene. And they have a new pet too!

Best Bit : Bring me the Boy!  71%

No.108 : The Reef (2010)

The Reef at the IMDb

 You know all those films you’ve seen about a group of sexy youths stranded at sea and who are plagued by a big shark? Well, here’s another one.

A group of four Australian twenty-somethings take off in a fancy boat to have a look at an idyllic island off The Great Barrier Reef. Their slightly older deckhand, who looks like Moxey off ‘Auf Wiedersehen Pet’,  does the heavy lifting as the two guys and two girls frolic about on the sand for five minutes. They quickly realise that their boat is in danger of running aground due to the tide but manage to get back on board in a scene that offers no peril whatsoever but a few bikini shots for those so inclined.

They decide to head back but as night falls they are all awakened as the boat capsizes due to the hull being ripped open by the coral reef. They all manage to escape the craft and soon assess their options from the upturned hull - stay with the boat or swim for safety. The leader of the group wants to swim but Moxey who “knows these waters” advises caution. I think he was trying to sound like a wise old sea salt but looked more like he was missing from a German building site.

The four pretty people decide to leave Moxie in the boat with the distress beacon and head off on the ten mile swim with a cut in half boogie board between them. As you’d expect things quickly go wrong as a portentous dead turtle signals trouble ahead. Can you guess what it is yet? Well if you’ve looked at the poster you’ll have gathered the trouble is in the shape of a big fraggin’ shark.

True to form the four youths are slowly whittled down by the shark who is either reading the script or just a bit hungry. Who will survive? Will that woman ever stop screaming and is the boat insured?

This was an OK ‘Based on True Events’ film but I bet my synopsis is longer than the plot pitched to the studio. If you’ve looked at the poster you’d be able to guess almost every event and there is really nothing here to recommend it over the superior ‘Open Water’ or even ‘Open water 2 : Adrift’. The attempts at characterisation were perfunctory at best with one pair a brother and sister with the added baggage of a former pair of lovers reunited for the trip. There were some touching moments of bonding and sacrifice but for the most part you are tapping your watch waiting for the shark to show up.

The five members of the cast were fine but there wasn’t much for them to do apart from scream a lot. The leader, who looks like former Rangers striker Nacho Novo, had the most to do in keeping the group together but the two womens’ scripts must have read ‘Aaaaarrrghhhh!’ for 20 pages.

The shark was well realised and the IMDb states it was a real one. You can see the joins as it bashes through our heroes however and the kills were a bit soft, mostly happening underwater with a change of the water colour the only clue that you are one more body closer to the end.

The film ends somewhat abruptly with a couple of captions serving to end the story and whether this was due to budget constraints or the magic 90 minutes being hit I’ve no idea - I’m not that bothered either way! It was competently made and had enough to have me stay to the conclusion but it was just so familiar and unmemorable that I’ll probably see it again in a year and be unaware I’ve been there before.

THE Tag Line - Don’t Lay Your Hands On a Copy. 45%

No.31 : The Crop (2004)

The Crop at the IMDb

We’re having a short season of Aussie films that are definite articles, have four letters in that definite article and they begin with ‘C’. As you may guess this will be a slightly short season and certainly one with variable quality.

We open with ‘The Crop’ which seems to be a bit of a mystery title, well it is if you use the IMDb for your information. ‘The Crop’ is listed as a futuristic film about a man in a car crash. I must of missed that bit as ‘The Crop’ I saw, which has the same cast, is about a lot of Aussie slobs growing dope. The other film described sounds like far more fun that this pile of crap however.

That said ‘The Crop’ sounds OK from the synopsis point of view, with it having the simple story of a strip club owner trying to get out of debt by growing drugs. I think I can spot the reason for his woes from the off however, as he appears to run the only strip joint on the planet that has a full live band and strippers who seem reluctant to take their tops off. Well ‘Blues Brothers 2000’ had the same idea but that got burnt down by the Russians for being shit. The club, not the film.

When you have a strip club owner / drug dealer as your protagonist you’d think that the producers would seek out a sympathetic and likable lead. It seems strange therefore that they went for an unlikable fat tit instead. Our man has troubles with his tit free titty bar and has the strange moral compunction to let his girls keep their pants on while his rivals go for the full value show.

Added to his troubles are a needy girlfriend and a pair of dozy stereotyped cops on the take. As a means to get out of his financial hole our hero decides to rent a remote farm and grow drugs. So far so morally wrong but let’s go with it, it might be fun with a few lessons learned along the way. Sadly, no. The drugs are seized by bent coppers as soon as they are grown and our man’s partner in crime is nicked. Strangely the cops let the drugs be stolen back and there is an endless chain of events while the drugs are intercepted, treated, stolen, sold etc. etc. We are left to wonder if our sleazy hero will get the cash to save him from the cops and loan sharks or will he get his just desserts in the form of 20 years hard labour.


This is a really terrible film with nothing to redeem it at all. It’s billed as a comedy but there are no laughs at all, as a bunch of nasty characters scrabble about in the dirt for a few bucks. The script is totally witless with the character bypassed lead with the unfeasible pretty girlfriend the least likable front man you’ll ever see. I don’t know if we’re meant to be cheering him on, but I for one was hoping the shot gun blast had taken his head off rather than predictably sprayed him with ketchup.

To flesh out the running time a couple of sub plots are thrown in involving stoners and someone else’s clingy girlfriend - laugh? You never will. The production seemed reasonably well financed with a half decent car crash near the end, but when you can see the stage hands pushing the kangaroo on set you know you aren’t dealing with the next Spielberg here.


I know I come across as a bit moral here and to be honest I don’t like drugs or films that make them seem like comedy currency. I’m not a total wet blanket and enjoy films like the Harold and Kumar adventures, but what they did was make drugs seem ridiculous and funny. This film makes them out to be an economic escape route and totally unfunny. A nasty, negative piece of rubbish that you’d need a pound of reefer to stay the course with. Man.

THE Tag Line : The Crap Is A Failed Harvest 23%