a review of 疯狗摩根

2021 CULT MOVIE CHALLENGE WEEK 36: OZPLOITATION WEEK Kind of an underwhelming slog, honestly. Dennis Hopper seems miscast here for a variety of reasons (mainly Hopper's spotty accent work and general mid-'70s drug haze), and his low-energy performance makes it hard to understand why this outlaw was so feared, let alone why he rated his own biographical movie. There's no real indication of Morgan's inner life outside of a handful of scenes interacting with his far more interesting Aboriginal sidekick Billy, well played by David Gulpilil. The first 30 minutes feels weirdly choppy, almost as though there was a missing reel between the first few minutes (depicting an surprisingly graphic massacre in a mining-camp opium den) and the rest of the movie. We ping-pong back and forth between episodic scenes of Morgan's bushranging career (which almost seem to be edited in at random, with Hopper's ever-changing, but always egregiously fake facial hair as the only indication of time or chronology) and scenes of the authorities tsk-tsking over Morgan's escapades, until the movie ends. It's almost worth watching the entire movie just for the epilogue, in which the victorious Aussie feds discuss their intentions to study and/or take trophies from Morgan's corpse, but I can't really recommend it unless you're really on an Australian western kick.