by Lisa Nystrom

Year:  2023

Director:  Jay Morrissey, Lisa Fineberg , John Campbell

Rated:  MA

Release:  21 June 2024

Distributor: Umbrella

Running time: 73 minutes

Worth: $4.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth

Cast:
Damian Callinan, Lisa Fineberg, Aaron Gocs, Dane Simpson, Ben Russell, Ethan Marrell, Luke McGregor

Intro:
… there just aren’t enough laughs to rival the endless moments of uncomfortable silence.

There’s lowbrow humour and no-brow humour, and thanks to comedy outfit Hot Dad Productions’ latest war movie send up, we may have just unlocked a whole new level of brow. Starting out as a web series, before eventually evolving into a film-length run-on joke, this First Blood meets Troma mash-up takes us all the way back to 1932 when the commonwealth of Australia declared war on their greatest foe to date—The Emu.

After an attempt to cull the nuisance of free roaming emus destroying crops and generally causing a ruckus proved unsuccessful, the Australian government resorted to the deployment of Royal Australian Artillery soldiers to tackle the problem—a move that was simultaneously heavy-handed and ultimately ineffective. A strange but true tale in which heavily armed soldiers fail to stand up to an army of birds with the “invulnerability of tanks” is on its own a solid base for comedy, unfortunately the fever dream created by Jonathan Schuster, Jay Morrissey, Lisa Fineberg and John Campbell doesn’t quite live up to the pitch.

Exaggerated, irreverent, and downright hammy, the story picks up with Major Meredith (Damian Callinan) leading his battalion of human resistance fighters, spurred onward by the death of his son at the talons of emu raiders. Left with nothing but the all-encompassing need for vengeance and his beloved dead son’s foreskin on a chain around his neck, Meredith marches towards certain death in a last-ditch attempt to avenge the family he lost, and save a world he no longer wants to live in.

The humour is crass and boorish, trying too hard to shock or offend and not nearly hard enough to land the punchline. The screenplay never does lose the web series feel, each set up playing out like an extended Vine compilation or skit show with a jarring lack of consistency. That’s not to say there are no direct hits amongst the misfires—the cobbled together emu puppets bearing machine guns is a chuckle-worthy visual, and the Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse Now voiceover as madness descends was a standout moment of inspiration. The film leans into its budgetary constraints with a self-aware kind of impudence, which might work if it carried over and managed to tip the scales into so-bad-it’s-good territory, but unfortunately there just aren’t enough laughs to rival the endless moments of uncomfortable silence.

For fans of gross out humour, if what your life was lacking was a man breastfeeding from an emu, some light incest, and an incontinent Prime Minister ingesting his own urine, then this one’s for you.

2Good
Score
2
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