The plinky plonk of a banjo - or guitar, I guess. The whisper of the wind through the corn. The smell of "country" (faeces). A nice way to open the movie, I suppose. There's a new cop and he has a pregnant wife, and he's moved to the middle of nowhere for a new job (the middle of nowhere in Australia, which is itself in the middle of nowhere). There's a horse in the parking lot and an angry sheriff and a church, and we can tell something bad is building.
We soon find out that he's moved out to the country because of his wife. They lost the last kid at 6 months and they have to keep her blood pressure down. I didn't have high hopes for its survival, judging by this movies listing as a "violent revenge thriller".
Very little background is given to the killer at first, though he is aesthetically pleasing (particularly his heavily scarred face). The characters are not very imaginative, and the writing is usually kind of meh. Most of the movie is just one big killing spree, with the scarred guy breaking out of prison and killing everyone in town. This gets tedious, though the action is competently shot.
The twist is very much needed, and it's an alright one. It's still difficult to feel sorry for the guy though, as he is brutally killing everyone. It wraps up kind of quickly, without explaining any of the legal stuff at the end or showing the wife's reaction. The leopard thing was rather dumb too, and acted as a clunky metaphor.
Red Hill: 33.3