Top 10 Aussie films to scare off tourists

The first two chapters offer a brutal vision of a post-apocalyptic Australia in which the freeway is ruled by savage bikie gangs that terrorise the rapidly crumbling remains of civilisation. But worse was to come with the third instalment.

If Tina Turner’s awful acting and terrifying hair, Neighbours’ Benito Alessi in bondage gear, and Mel Gibson beating the living crap out of a mentally handicapped man-child isn’t one of cinema’s most chilling depictions of the apocalypse, then I don’t know what is.

Everyone knows that Australia is home to some pretty nasty critters: crocs, funnelwebs, great whites, dropbears. Something that visitors might not be expecting to have to worry about however, are giant homicidal pigs.

Melbourne-born director Russell Mulcahy found time in between directing some of the 80s’ campest music clips to cook up this fun and visually startling cult classic – which is surprisingly smart for a film about a boar the size of a kombi-van leading a squealing horde of pigs in a vendetta against the local populace.

Australia’s entry into the very small and very sloppy ‘melt’ genre. Whilst these films were primarily a (thoroughly commendable) excuse for the special effects guys to see just how much latex and corn syrup they can shovel into a film before someone calls them on going that little bit too far over the line, Body Melt manages to keep the viewer entertained during the parts where unsuspecting suburbanites aren’t turning into puddles of colourful gloop.

It’s maniacally funny, has a killer electronic soundtrack, and gets in many a dig in at the image-obsessed culture of the pill-popping early 90s. This film is worth tracking down even if it’s only to watch Ramsay Street’s Harold Bishop gleefully throwing himself into the madness as a psychotic doctor.

Bad Boy Bubby tells the twisted tale of a 35-year-old man taking his first steps into the outside world after having been confined to his room for his entire life by his abusive mother. Bubby’s darkly funny and oddly touching odyssey through the city of churches involves incest, murder and blasphemy, but it’s the scenes of him ‘playing’ with his pet cat that really got people worked up.

I’m pretty sure that isn’t an animatronic kitty, and would be willing to bet that the words ‘no animals were hurt in the making of this film’ aren’t to be found anywhere in the credits...

As if rampaging bikies, killer fauna and Harold Bishop with a handgun wasn’t enough to worry about, the villain here is a million-year-old volcanic rock formation. The elegant period setting of this film, which tells the story of the disappearance of several schoolgirls and their teacher during an outing to the eponymous rock, belies a creepiness that settles over the imagination and is difficult to shake.

Whilst the supernatural is never explicitly alluded to, the film does an excellent job of anthropomorphising Hanging Rock into a malignant, manipulative entity capable of stirring a weird fascination and repulsion in the impressionable young minds of those who wander too deep amongst its crevices and phallic peaks. Like the novel it was based upon, the film ultimately offers no real explanation of what happened to the girls, and is all the more disturbing for it.

Lawless youth running amok and daring escapes from unusual prisons are two things that filmmakers in the 80s apparently couldn’t get enough of, and this film combines both in a work of celluloid genius. Problem teenagers are rounded up into a drive-in and left to their own devices.

Attempts to keep them occupied with fast food, trashy television and Hunters & Collectors songs inevitably go tits-up and the movie lot is soon looking like an adolescent version of Mad Max. Rather surprisingly, it’s based on a short story by esteemed novelist Peter Carey.

The Australian bush is not such an appealing travel destination when you’re a political prisoner being hunted down and creatively murdered for entertainment in a bleak dystopian future, now is it? This low-budget but imaginative, bat-shit insane exploitation film is notable for its ludicrously over-the-top gore and sheer number of Australian soap actors and actresses in the cast.

With crossbow-wielding lesbians, severed limbs, top-hat wearing wolfmen and gratuitous shower block scenes, it makes modern day grindhouse imitations such as Machete and Planet Terror seem like anaemic shadows in comparison.

Sharks: Australia has ’em in spades (those famous underwater scenes in Jaws were filmed off Adelaide, FYI) but it was only in 2010 that someone decided to make an Australian stranded-yacht crew-getting-picked-off-by-a-great-white movie.

The characters in Andrew Trauki’s film are as shallow as the water they’re frantically paddling in isn’t, but the actors (including Gyton Grantley) are good enough to make you feel their terror as the monster fish stalks and devours them one by one. Welcome to the world famous Barrier Reef.

The low-key, realist mood, the senselessness of the slayings and the everyman mundanity of the antagonist in Greg McLean’s shocking debut feature set the worms of doubt squirming in the brains of many a backpacker planning a road trip through the Australian outback. Nicely touching on themes explored in Picnic at Hanging Rock, it drops hints that the land itself holds a mysterious and not necessarily benevolent power over those that walk upon it.

It is also responsible for tainting a much-loved scene in cinema: here the words “that’s not a knife...” aren’t followed by an affable bloke showing some New York street thugs who the boss is, but rather an affable bloke giving an explanation, then demonstration, of what a ‘head on a stick’ is.

All too believable in its depiction of the horrific Snowtown murders of the 1990s, Justin Kurzel’s film has had viewers all over the country asking, is it too soon?

By showing how popular and likeable John Bunting (Daniel Henshall) was, and yet how utterly without remorse when torturing and murdering anyone he took a dislike to, the film puts a question mark above the head of every seemingly friendly ocker bloke the unsuspecting visitor should happen to meet. Gourmet travellers, beware: in South Australia, it’s not just the wine that ferments in barrels.