Maybe it started with cult classic Spider Baby. Or perhaps The Texas Chainsaw Massacre represents the proper origin. Debate the details to your heart’s content, hillbilly horror is a firmly entrenched subgenre in horror today. In addition to a major franchises that include The Hills Have Eyes and Wrong Turn, there’s countless ‘no frill’s indie fare that check off all the right boxes. Last year, Aussie indie horror No Such Thing As Monsters quietly made its way to VOD platforms. Only a handful of reviews are currently available so this is something of an unknown entity.
Synopsis
For Mary, a weekend camping in a caravan somewhere in the remote wilderness is anything but a romantic getaway. But for her boyfriend, David, it’s the perfect opportunity to finally propose. All is going well until a strange family shows up to the same spot disrupting the couple’s privacy. While the siblings are initially friendly, their behavior becomes more and more erratic. Any hope of making a quick exit ends when Mary wakes up in the morning chained to her caravan bed with no sight of David.
No Such Thing As Monsters Is An Underdeveloped Ozploitation With Nothing New To Offer
Regardless of director Scott Stanton and co-writer Karen Elgar’s intentions, No Such Thing As Monsters firmly plants itself in the Hillbilly Horror subgenre. It’s a couple of middle-class, educated protagonists who find themselves deep in the wilderness. Yes, the kind of remote where there’s no bar on your phone. And our villains are backwoods folk who are so obviously up to no good that one can hardly imagine how any sensible person would stick around. Of course, Stanton and Elgar’s screenplay throw in some backwoods incest – another lazy subgenre trope. Whether it’s the Outback or the Appalachians, we’ve seen this movie before many times.
And our villains are backwoods folk who are so obviously up to no good that one can hardly imagine how any sensible person would stick around.
Arguably, No Such Thing As Monsters only distinguishes itself by what’s missing. By and large, this is an extremely undercooked bit of movie-making. Certainly, ambiguity can strengthen a movie’s overall narrative. In fact, there’s nothing worse than lazy expository dialogue. Nevertheless, Stanton and Elgar aren’t so much ambiguous as they are just undershooting on critical bits of storytelling. There’s major bits of basic storytelling absent from this Ozploitation thriller. We have no idea who are villains are and while we’re able to infer what they want, it takes quite a bit of time. As a result, much of No Such Thing As Monsters feels like random bits of cruelty spread out over roughly 90 minutes.
No Such Thing As Monsters Fails to Provide Truly Scary Villains
Of course, derivative fare has its time and place if executed properly. From The Hills Have Eyes to Wrong Turn to Wolf Creek, any good Hillbilly horror movie boasts plenty of shocking Grindhouse gore. Someone must have forgot to mention this to Stanton. In spite of some half-hearted attempts at vintage ‘Torture Porn’, No Such Thing As Monsters plays out as a relatively tame retread of subgenre conventions. In general, there’s no reason why a horror movie needs explicit gore to work as a genre movie. But Hillbilly horror movies kind of require it as part of subgenre conventions. And this Ozploitation never feels very exploitative and there’s little to no connection to its Grindhouse roots.
From The Hills Have Eyes to Wrong Turn to Wolf Creek, any good Hillbilly horror movie boasts plenty of shocking Grindhouse gore. Someone must have forgot to mention this to Stanton.
None of the performances are necessarily bad. Most of the cast is good enough to meet at least some minimal expectations. In fact, Angel Giuffria rises above a poor screenplay to at least give audiences some semblance of a developed character. She manages to elicit a bit of empathy from audiences. Though she spends the entirety of the movie bandaged up like the Invisible Man, Georgia Crisfield Smith offers up at least some mystery as the tortured ‘Amy’. Like everything else about this movie, she’s undercooked, but she makes for an unsettling image. Some characters turn up at the very end of the movie only to be discarded with little to no development or actual use to the story.
No Such Thing As Monsters An Underwhelming Addition to Hillbilly Horror
There’s really not much to say about No Such Thing As Monsters. When a premise has been as often as the one driving this indie Ozploitation flick, you need to do one of two things. Pull the rug out from under viewers’ feet and subvert expectations. Or double down and deliver the expected good. Sadly, No Such Thing As Monster does neither of those things. Instead, Stanton turns in an undercooked version of what we’ve seen done many times over without any shocks or Grindhouse gore. It’s a mostly watchable entry into Hillbilly Horror that you’ll quickly forget afterwards.