I DON’T WANT to make a mountain out of Red Hill, but those obsessed with True Grit and who are seeking out another Western real fast could do worse. Director Patrick Hughes makes his influences clear in this story of a modern Australian small town’s night of terror: he names the new constable “Cooper,” as in Gary. Ryan Kwanten (“Jason” in True Blood) left the city for reasons known to him and his very pregnant wife.
His new chief, Bill (Australian TV star Steve Bisley), is the head man in a hamlet that’s evaporating right before the old man’s eyes. During Cooper’s first morning on the job, the TV reports an escape from a nearby prison: Jimmy (Tommy Lewis, a kind of Down Under Charles Bronson) is coming back to settle some old scores.
Blatant is the word for Red Hill, with Lewis’ scar-faced gunman named Jimmy in honor of Lewis’ title role in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. On the soundtrack, the AC/DC-worthy cock-rock of Stevie Wright’s “Black-Eyed Bruiser” recalls Australia’s berserker ’70s movies; we hear it as the rifle-bearing Jimmy cleans out lurkers in a motel.
Maybe you’d have to be as monumental as Bisley—he has a fierce white Buffalo Bill beard and doesn’t look at all ludicrous for it—to have a straight enough face to inform the posse that, when Jimmie arrives, “He’ll be bringing hell with him.”
The script and the soundtrack parrot other movies, but the landscape speaks for itself. The town scenes are shot around Omeo, Victoria, in the wild, cold and rugged area called Gippsland. It’s so desolate that a bit about a mystery beast prowling the hills (let’s just say it’s a kind of feline Hound of the Baskervilles) doesn’t seem to be ridiculous.
The country is so high and wide that one almost understands Old Bill’s scorn at the environmentalists who are preserving it, because “somebody might step on a fucking flower.” Maybe so, but Hughes’ straight-from–High Noon account of the cravenness of the townsfolk and Kwanten’s believably done assumption of the film’s moral center won’t step on anyone’s toes.
Red HillR; 95 min.
