For my foray into Shudder I decided to start with one of the platform’s exclusive titles, the 2017 Australian “creature feature” Boar.
The premise of the movie is simple, there’s a gigantic boar that, despite being the size of a rhinoceros, is able to ambush a variety of shallow yet charming characters in a quiet rural community and maul them one-by-one. There’s no origin story or deeper subplots, there’s just a giant boar following the sequential narrative of a slasher movie.
Given the outlandishness of the concept I was hoping the film would be more over-the-top, not necessarily in the campy way like Leprechaun, but more so in the overflowing with vulgarity and lewdness way. Instead, it seems like the intention behind Boar was to just make a solid 3/5 creature feature. The film’s director, Chris Sun, even stated as much in a 2018 interview with Filmoria. Boar wasn’t meant to take itself seriously, it was just intended to be a fun film about a giant pig running wild. To this end the film does deliver fun moments through its ample amounts of gore and scenes involving prolonged standoffs with the pig.
Personally I think the film would have been better if it maintained a focus on suspense, which is how it begins. At the onset of the movie the boar leaps out of the cover of night, partially obscured by both the camera frame and the darkness, and claims unsuspecting victims. By the end of the movie the pig is fully visible and charging at people in broad daylight, yet somehow they don’t see or hear it approaching in an open field.
Essentially, the film starts as a thriller and morphs into some kind of pseudo Jurassic Park. There’s even a scene in which two characters come across the pig grazing by a bush in broad daylight and they proceed to stand and watch it in awe for a few minutes, like they just landed on Isla Nubar and saw a dinosaur for the first time. They’re then eaten and dismembered in T-Rex fashion.
Despite its shortcomings Boar delivers on its promise to be nothing more than a fun, straightforward creature feature. If you want a movie that isn’t overly engrossing or serious that you can watch while scrolling through your phone or hooting the weeds this could be exactly what you need.
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