FILM GUTTER REVIEWS: ​CHARLIE'S FARM (2014)

Dir. Chris Sun, Australia, 93 mins

This was another one of those movies I've been meaning to get to for a while that seems to have something of a cult following – I've certainly heard it talked of pretty fondly in a few places. However having endured 93 minutes of this one, I'm a little lost as to what it is people seem to have liked about it. Worst of all, I was only about ten minutes in before it was self-evident this was going to be absolutely awful. If I weren't reviewing it, I probably would have switched it off, but the lot of any reviewer is to plough regardless of their own enjoyment or critical opinion of the movie. So here is my take on Charlie's Farm.
 
You may have noticed I wasn't that keen on this one...
 
Charlie's Farm takes place in Australia and begins with a group of four 'characters' – I use the term loosely – deciding to go on a break somewhere. One of the guys is a fan of haunted houses, so they decide to go to the aforementioned Charlie's Farm to check it out – without telling the two girls they are taking, of course. When they get nearer they have to ask for directions, and the locals at the nearby watering hole don't like the talk of Charlie's Farm at all. But eventually they find it and decide to stay there a night or two, despite it being creepy as hell and there fundamentally being nothing to do there. Throw in the fact that apparently stacks of backpackers have gone missing there and the place has a deeply troubled history and anyone who has done Horror 101 will know there's trouble ahead.
 
And 'Horror 101' seems basically to be the way to describe this. Everything about this movie is basic and simplistic. The pace is horribly lumbering and slow – it is literally an hour before we even get our first proper glimpse of Charlie, whose backstory is clumsily foisted in through three flashbacks. And it's not sad or tragic – his mother and father were basically cannibals, so any sympathy is distinctly lacking, if that was ever the idea. Then again, shock value seems to mostly be the order of the day. And despite the fact the action doesn't begin for an hour, we don't get to know anything about our 'characters' at all – I'm hard pressed to tell you what they even did in the first two-thirds of the movie. I literally watched this movie a few hours ago and that first 60 minutes is already mostly vanished from my memory.
 
To be honest, it's hard to say that the last half an hour is really any better. Sure, it's more gruesome and violent, if that's your thing, but it's been done a lot better in many other places. It's impossible to care as the paper-thin characters are chopped up one by one by the hulking figure of Charlie, because it's hard to tell what they were even doing there in the first place. There's nobody likeable enough for each kill to have any impact on you. These four – six if you include the two later arrivals – are just meat for the grinder. I was at least expecting some imaginative kills or some impressive visuals, but even those were missing – the final murder is particular uninspiring from an FX point of view.
 
I can only figure this has a cult following as a 'bad movie', but there are good bad movies and there are bad bad movies. I'm not a huge lover of flat-out trash, but there are some B-movies I have a liking for, things like Teeth, Pervert and Basket Case. But those at least have some energy and some imagination to them. This is lazy, derivative, badly-acted and boring, every horror cliché rolled into one big ball and spat out without any effort to set itself apart.
 
RATING: 0/10. I don't like to come in hard on movies – in fact I want everything I watch for Film Gutter to be good, and in many cases they are. Sometimes they are genuinely excellent. But occasionally – just occasionally – they are terrible, and that's where Charlie's Farm falls. An over-familiar plotline, ham acting, characters I couldn't tell you the first thing about, a draggingly slow pace and a tedious and entirely expected ending all combine to make this one of the worst movies I've reviewed here. You should take the advice of the patrons of the local pub and avoid Charlie's Farm like the plague.