Re-Living Off The Land

Synopsis:  A bunch of wannabe film makers who get together after 10 years to remake a horror film that they had tried to make in their student days.

Characters with a  lack of talent and a serious lack of awareness of same are commonly found as elements of comedy, and particularly in one of its sub-genres, the mockumentary. The best known of all such, Christopher Guest’s This is Spinal Tap (1984) trades precisely on these elements. A crucial element of the mockumentary is the fact that the viewer is unsure whether the challenged people he or she is watching are real or fictional. When it becomes evident that it is a set-up, a considerable amount of the gloss is lost and the attention then turns to the film-makers rather than their subject matter. It is in this divide that Paul Murphy’s Re-Living Off The Land gets stuck. Of course, being a no-budget film one cuts it a good deal of slack but essentially it is too clearly a put-on to draw us into its story and thus we pay too much attention to how the film is made, and frankly that is not well, than what it is about. 

Writer-directors Murphy and Simon Best have some good boundary blurring elements here. They have the original footage that they really did make 10 years ago. They managed to get legendary Australian genre film-maker Richard Franklin to play a droll part as himself and fortuitously and probably the richest vein of all, one of their mates from the original shoot, Wally De Backer, went on to change his name to Gotye and become a real-life ARIA-winning recording artist (you can find his work on YouTube).  

There are some funny moments such as Gotye spitting the dummy and Simon’s re-worked Kung-Fu movie as well as funny characters such as Graham (Matt Brick), Goyte's hapless replacement, but overall, at the level of both script and its realization the film has not been worked into something which stands independent of its self-referentiality. Like a home movie, it no doubt has great appeal if you are part of it, but not a whole lot if you are not. Although Murphy and Best claim to have finished with it as a project, the concept is good and they have the raw material and there is no reason, other than lack of money, why they couldn’t take it to the next level.

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