Two Heads Creek — Review

Synopsis: A timid butcher and his drama-queen twin sister quit the hostile confines of post-Brexit Britain and head to Australia in search of their birth mother — but the seemingly tolerant townsfolk are hiding a dark, meaty secret.

Cast: Kerry Armstrong, Kathryn Wilder, Gary Sweet, Stephen Hunter, Jordan Waller, Don Bridges, Helen Dallimore, Kevin Harrington

Director: Jesse O’Brien
Writer: Jordan Waller

There’s a great scene in Two Heads Creek where two characters volley “yeah, nah” and “nah, yeah” back and forth, which had me laughing for a solid minute. It’s followed by a gruesome, comedic death full of blood and gore. Those elements let Two Heads Creek tick the boxes for a solid horror-comedy, tying them together with a fairly on-the-nose political jab at both the U.K. and Australia.

Norman (Jordan Waller, who also pens the script) is introduced attempting to use a meat grinder in all the wrong ways inside a butcher shop. It’s the shop he and his twin Annabelle (Kathryn Wilder) — a budding actor and the family’s school drop-out — have just inherited after their mum’s passing. Norman wants to keep it; Annabelle wants to sell. The shop is being vandalised and slandered for its Polish owners, with Brexit campaigners yelling less-polite versions of “go back to where you came from” several times in the opening ten minutes.

Sorting through their mum’s things, they discover she was their adoptive mother — and their birth mother is in Australia, in a small, fictional Queensland town called Two Heads Creek. So the twins pack their bags to meet her.

Once in Australia, they’re quickly shepherded onto a bus to Two Heads Creek and introduced to Apple (Helen Dallimore), played with a clear Pauline Hanson inspiration. Apple thanks all the “foreigners” for coming to Australia; Annabelle asks why there are so many Chinese people on the bus — a woman plainly replies she’s Vietnamese. If the film’s undertones aren’t obvious by this point, you’re not paying attention.

In town, the twins find a run-down back-end community full of stereotypical white-Aussie Larkins, including Apple’s lover Noah (Kevin Harrington), their son Eric (David Adlam), their young daughter, and a man who seems to lead the bunch, Hans (Gary Sweet). After a beer scene with a few cans of XXXX, a hearty meal and meet-and-greet, things start tumbling down the weird and wacky hole as the twins search for their mother.

Two Heads Creek has a big reveal they telegraph from the start with a figurative floodlight. It still lands, though, thanks to how writer Jordan Waller stages it and how director Jesse O’Brien assembles a lively sequence that lets the whole cast have fun with the material.

The film is a comedy at heart and never truly tries to scare you, but with Samuel Baulch behind the camera it always looks like it could swerve into The Hills Have Eyes at any moment. The unnerving tone — paired with the town’s creepy production design — keeps you on your toes for the first quarter.

The twins are both likeable — Kathryn Wilder and Jordan Waller do fine work — but the creepy, eccentric townsfolk steal scenes, particularly Kerry Armstrong (when she appears) clearly having a blast, and the aforementioned Helen Dallimore as Apple.

Two Heads Creek doesn’t have anything especially profound to say about immigration in Australia or the U.K., but anchoring the film in those topics helps it stand out from other horror-comedies using similar tropes — and it’s a lot of fun to watch.

(Two Heads Creek screener provided for review)