Russell Crowe & Daniel Pollock in Romper Stomper (1992)
“We came to wreck everything and ruin your life. We were sent by God”. Spoken by Sonny Jim, a member of the Neo-nazi gang that detonates the carnage of writer-director Geoffrey Wright’s feature film, Romper Stomper. These prophetic words pretty much sum up the raison d’etre of the gang, though it seems more likely the bunch manifested from inside a Melbourne back alley than on the commands of the Geezer in the sky.
During the film, Hando, his right hand man Davey, Sonny Jim, Gabe and co collide with everything in their path whilst at the same time giving a window into the lives of an isolated group on the absolute fringe of society.
A thumping and sinister brass score which garnered John Clifford White awards for best score and soundtrack forcibly cradles you with a sense of what’s to come, but as story lines unravel around racial rivalries, sexual abuse and a group of working class youth battling with cultural displacement, the layers evaporate and nothing really gets solved. Gabe, the waify love interest, played by Jacqueline McKenzie, breezes into the picture carrying the veiled baggage of drug and sexual abuse and awakes to find herself in a squat decked out with wall-sized swastikas, copies of Mein Kampf and other Nazi memorabilia yet doesn’t question anything. Even the group of Vietnamese-Australians who are the foil and sponge for the anger of the Romper Stomper lot aren’t seen again after around the 40min mark.
From the outset there is no hope or redemption for this group, and the only glimmers of affirmation are offered to Davey through his hidden desire for Hando’s girl Gabe. The tense climax and is only relieved by a brutal and inevitable showdown between the two top dogs vying for emotional salvation through competing for the affection of the comparatively pure Gabe. This film was extremely powerful in parts and an unflinching depiction of lives without purpose, but for characters reverberating with such rage, recklessness and angst, it would’ve been satisfying to further to explore the motives and reasons that drove Hando and his rag-tag Nazi squad.
This was a brutal picture of seemingly empty racial aggression, showing perhaps most unnervingly how individuals can crash though and at the same time waste life, if the time to stop and think isn’t afforded.
Bare Reviews Innit. Wot. 