by Stephen Vagg

With The Red – a new Australian film about a giant zombie kangaroo with a taste for flesh – about to premiere at BIFF, Stephen Vagg thought it was time to revisit the killer kangaroo genre. (Spoilers: it isn’t very large)

Australia is blessed with native fauna of which the most iconic is the kangaroo. Okay, yes, sure, koalas probably have a higher Q rating and who doesn’t love a platypus, or feel a pang of melancholy over the words “Tasmanian tiger”, etc, but for a blue chip non-controversial “number one Australian animal”, it’s hard to go past the ‘roo. The marsupial appears everywhere – on trademarks, coats of arms, coins, sporting team names. It’s also used in the title of lots of movies that don’t really have anything to do with kangaroos like The Kangaroo Kid (1950), Kangaroo (1952) and Kangaroo (1987).

Most on-screen depictions of the kangaroo have been sympathetic. Leading the charge is, of course, Skippy, the first blockbuster Australian television series, which was spun off into a surprisingly unsuccessful feature film, The Intruders (1969).

More than thirty years before that, there was Chut, the orphaned kangaroo thrust into life as a tent boxer, in Orphan of the Wilderness (1936). This is one of Ken G. Hall’s best movies, a sort of Call of the Wild with a roo instead of a dog, whose scenes of brutality led to the movie being banned in England. The Americans didn’t have trouble with boxing kangaroos – they pop up in films like Hell Below (1933), Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) and Matilda (1978).

Animation is very pro-kangaroo. There are sympathetic ‘roos in the Dot and the Kangaroo franchise, the Kiko the Kangaroo franchise, the Hippety Hopper franchise, the Blinky Bill franchise (Splodge), the Winnie the Pooh franchise (Kanga and Roo), along with series like Rocko’s Modern Life, Kangaroo Beach, Radio Roo, The Koala Brothers, and The Kangaroo Creek Gang. Live action is also generally roo friendly: Kangaroo Jack (2003) and the upcoming Kangaroo (2025) from Kate Woods.

In the world of cinema, killing kangaroos has traditionally been depicted as a Very Bad Thing. The entirely accurate (and brilliantly shot) depiction of a kangaroo shoot in Wake in Fright (1970) is usually met with gasps of horror. The villains in Crocodile Dundee (1986) are roo shooters – as are those in Fair Game (1985), Razorback (1984) and Orphan of the Wilderness too, come to think of it.

What films have featured scary kangaroos? Not a lot. There was Welcome to Woop Woop (1996) – originally called “The Big Red” after the giant scary kangaroo that appears at the climax of the film. However, even the villains in that film are not so much the kangaroo as Rod Taylor and Susie Porter. The most villainous kangaroo on screen to date has probably been The Sour Kangaroo in Horton Hears a Who (2008).

When Australia wants to make a killer creature film, it has traditionally looked towards carnivores such as crocodiles (Rogue, Black Water, Dark Age), sharks (Bait, The Reef), pigs (Razorback), and, most of all, bogans (too many to mention). Snakes, spiders and jellyfish are deadly to humans but don’t get much of a look-in on screen because they’re not very cinematic (the exception being Everett de Roche’s 1978 masterpiece The Long Weekend, which throws in everything).

The kangaroo is a very cinematic animal, but it’s never been a flat-out villain in a movie until The Red.

The odd thing is that kangaroos aren’t super popular with Australians; they don’t make good pets, they cause endless hassle to farms, they’re not very friendly, they cause accidents on roads by hopping in front of you. They can even kill you. Australians don’t, on the whole, seem to mind that much that so many of them are culled. Americans do. This is explored in the 2018 documentary Kangaroo: A Love-Hate Story.

The Red is up against history. We should make more zombie kangaroo films. Can it defeat a century of pro-roo propaganda? We shall see.

The Red is world premiering at the Brisbane International Film Festival on 25 October 2024, tix here.

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