Image courtesy Geoffrey Wright
DISCLAIMER: This essay contains spoilers for a 1992 film and a 2018 series, and contains references to homophobia, incest, murder, racism, rape, suicide, and violence.
“You don’t know who the enemy is, you can’t win the war.”
-Hando (Russell Crowe)
1992 was a pivotal turning point for the issue of race. In America, the Los Angeles uprising resulted from the acquittal of police officers caught on videotape beating Rodney King, an unarmed Black man, with batons. The United States was forced to reckon with its history of oppression against people of color, and a Democrat was elected President that November in part due to what Princeton University professor Paul Frymer characterized in Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America (1999) as Black voters’ response to Republican hostility towards minorities. Bill Clinton was seen as the only reasonable choice, despite actually parroting conservative rhetoric against welfare and giving us the “Sister Souljah moment,” when he criticized the hip hop musician in a speech to the Rainbow Coalition and its founder Jesse Jackson.
Meanwhile, in Australia, the courts and government began the process of reconciliation with Aboriginal people, including the “Mabo decision” recognizing Native pre-colonial claims to land, the Prime Minister making the “Redfern Park speech” accepting accountability for the historical mistreatment of Indigenous people, and the “Different Colours, One People” youth campaign against racial violence. This program was established after a study showed an increase in attacks by white Australian teenage boys against people of color, including Vietnamese immigrants and the Asian-Australian population in general.
Geoffrey Wright, the Australian writer and director, saw this racist movement happening in his hometown of Melbourne and conducted interviews with “street thugs… on their way into it or on their way out,” taking note of the cues they had taken from “certain political ideas and… inspiration from their counterparts in Europe,” according to his 2012 conversation with Richard Gray of TheReelBits.com. This research, plus the publicized case of skinhead Dane Sweetman killing another neo-Nazi with an axe at a party celebrating the birthday of Adolf Hitler, informed Wright’s creation of the gang in his debut feature film, “Romper Stomper.” The title came from one of Wright’s interview subjects, referring to his Dr. Martens boots.
Released in Australia in November 1992, the film was funded on a low budget by government agencies The Australian Film Convention and Film Victoria after Wright failed to get traditional film market investors to sign on. It was shot on what FilmInk’s Erin Free describes as “16mm short-ends, a partial roll of unexposed film stock left over from a previous production, and kept for use later,” achieving a “singularly gritty look.”
Image courtesy Geoffrey Wright/Stan
The casting favored unknown theater actors like Daniel Wyllie, who had only previously appeared in one film, “The Efficiency Expert” with Anthony Hopkins, John Brumpton, whose sole film credit was garbageman comedy “Garbo,” and Jacqueline McKenzie, who had only performed on stage. The two male leads had a bit more experience, having appeared in a handful of movies, including one with each other called “Proof.” They were the late Daniel Pollock, and another player in “The Efficiency Expert,” a young Russell Crowe.
The story takes place in Melbourne and follows Crowe as Hando, the leader of a gang of neo-Nazi skinheads, his best friend Davey as played by Pollock, and their new acquaintance, a troubled teen girl called Gabe, which was McKenzie’s debut movie role. Wyllie is one of the twentysomething hooligans, nicknamed Cackles, and Brumpton is Magoo, another racist skin visiting with his girlfriend from the Australian capital Canberra, a seven hour drive away. Magoo sells Davey the Chekhov's Gun of the plot - in this case, a 1945 Hitler Youth knife, with a partial contribution from Hando when Davey comes up short of Magoo’s asking price.
We see the group throw drunken parties with Oi music in their warehouse, culminating in a rough looking sex scene with Hando and Gabe. (Crowe would cause a scandal at an awards show years later when joking that he was accidentally “sodomizing” McKenzie during the shooting of the scene - in a Facebook post, she confirmed the awkwardness they felt on set, but clarified that Crowe’s comment was part of a shared running joke “over the eons” of their decades-long friendship.) They also vandalize a closed shopping mall and terrorize local Vietnamese residents.
They eventually get their comeuppance from Tiger, the brother of one of their victims, played by Tony Le-Nguyen (billed as Tony Lee). Tiger organizes dozens of young Vietnamese men to attack and overwhelm Hando’s gang, in the most impressive action sequence in a film full of brutal fights. In the melee, Tiger’s army knock Magoo out and leave him for dead in the streets, burn down the warehouse, and force the last skinheads standing to flee.
And that’s all only in the first half of the movie, which is set to the aforementioned Nazi punk rock music, as well as an ominous orchestral score by John Clifford White that gives the film an extra dose of noir genre feel. Although, there isn’t so much a whodunit unraveling amongst these hard boiled criminals, rather a stubborn trudge towards inevitable doom.
Image courtesy Geoffrey Wright/Stan
Gabe is also a bit more complex than your average femme fatale. Not quite the innocent love interest and damsel in distress, she is an accomplice to Hando and Davey’s crimes, including a convenience store robbery that ends with Hando strangling the clerk to death. But she struggles with epilepsy, the trauma of losing her mother at a young age to a decapitating car accident (“I think that when I have kids,” Gabe opines, “she will be one of them, sort of reincarnated”), and sexual abuse by her father, a successful movie producer named Martin. Gabe also acts as a caretaker to Davey, tending to his lacerations after he punches out a window (his injury written into the film after Pollock actually hurt himself on the glass, adding one previously unplanned layer of sympathy for his character, too). They continue to bond when Davey is the only skin to check after Gabe when she has a seizure in front of the gang.
When what’s left of the group is on the run after Tiger’s siege, they use two of their female associates to trick a pair of hippie men into giving up their warehouse. They run the hippies off with gay slurs and threats of chopping their legs off as Hando brandishes a hatchet (Wright’s nod to Sweetman, who had committed that act on his victim), making the squat their new hideout.
Soon after, our sympathy for Gabe is manipulated into rooting for Hando, Davey, Cackles, young teen Bubs (played by 15 year old James McKenna, whose other roles before and after were in TV, seemingly leaving acting behind after 1997) and Sonny Jim (the late Leigh Russell - reports indicate he passed in 2004) as they break into Martin’s house. They enter with a similar ruse to how they drew the hippies out, then tie Martin up to a toilet, and either destroy or begin to steal his possessions. This sequence also contains the most iconic line of the film, said to Martin, used in the trailer, used as a title of a composition on the score, sampled in countless songs years after, and used for the title of a wealth of articles about the film:
“We came to wreck everything and ruin your life. God sent us.”
-Sonny Jim (Leigh Russell)
A captive Martin suggests Gabe initiated their sexual relationship, provoking Gabe into kicking him, and in another example of the movie’s dark humor, narrowly missing his head with a Bhaiṣajyaguru statue (from the typically peaceful Buddhists). Gabe leaves the room, allowing Martin to cut his restraints with the broken statue and toilet pieces. He leaves the bathroom, retrieves a gun, and chases Gabe and the skins away.
Back at the warehouse, Gabe needles Hando over them having abandoned their loot at Martin’s, and calls him a loser. When Hando responds by punching her, Gabe leaves the gang behind and Davey goes with her. This dialogue is excerpted at the beginning of “Fourth Reich Fighting Men” on the soundtrack album, the neo-Nazi posturing of the lyrics subverted by Gabe’s remarks. “You live like shit! You can’t even look after yourselves!”
The song also plays as Tiger and his comrades corner Hando and his crew, and the reprise is used once again to subvert its message. On her way following Davey to his German grandmother’s home, Gabe calls the police to give them Hando and the gang’s location. Hando sees the police coming and sneaks off, cowardly abandoning the skins who look up to him as their leader. The Oi anthem plays during his retreat and the entrance of the police into the co-opted hippie squat. Bubs, brandishing a prop gun nabbed from Martin the movie producer’s house, is shot and killed by the arriving police as a helpless Cackles and Sonny Jim look on. (In some cuts of the film, the bullet wound is on his forehead, in others he’s been shot through the eyeball - and different versions of special edition DVDs show more gore from the forehead wound.) The last we see of the two surviving flunkies are while they are on the receiving end of clear police brutality. But the tone is at least a tiny bit comic as Sonny Jim offers a surrender, only to be met by a policewoman yelling, “Too fuckin’ late!” and kneeing him in the groin.
Davey hides his Nazi patches to spare his grandmother, and makes love with Gabe in a scene vastly contrasting from her earlier hookups with Hando. They are naked and asleep when Hando appears hovering over them, breaking the news of their mates’ respective deaths or arrests. Hando seems unphased by coming out on the losing end of a love triangle that analysts have debated for years - is the conflict between Hando and Davey, and their feelings for Gabe, or Hando and Gabe fighting for the affections of Davey? Hando is quick to dismiss earlier quarrels as water under the bridge, more concerned the three of them get on the move before the authorities arrive looking for them at Grandma’s.
After robbing the shop and killing the clerk, Hando drives the trio to Bells Beach (the same place, it should be noted, where Johnny Utah lets Bodhi catch one last wave in “Point Break”). The three walk about the beach, Gabe separating from the boys to play in the sand. When Gabe hears Hando trying to cajole Davey into paying her off and leaving her behind (not hearing Davey’s refusal), she torches their vehicle. She confesses that she dropped the dime on the hideout to the cops that just killed Bubs and arrested the others. Hando attacks her, strangling her and trying to drown her, all the while using his fists to fend off an intervening Davey.
Then out comes that Hitler Youth knife, the one Hando helped pay for. He is repaid with a stab to the neck, meeting a grisly death by stumbling into the sand as he bleeds out, Davey sobbing - perhaps out of relief for Gabe’s well-being, perhaps also out of grief for what he had to do to the other great love of his life. Davey holds a weakened Gabe as a group of Japanese tourists coming off a bus appear on a cliff overhead, having arrived to see the beach (as would be a common occurrence at the site in real life) but taking pictures instead of the sad state of affairs on the beach below.
This aspect of the ending has been criticized as playing off stereotypes about the Japanese (TVTropes.org has a page devoted to the 1980s and 1990s cliche), and there is certainly a bit of that Wright dark comedy in sightseers snapping pics of a dead Nazi and his two former accomplices lying battered on the beach. But the scene treats the pairing of Gabe and Davey with tenderness, her asking him simply to stay. The last lines of the film are subtitled and belong to two women speaking in Japanese, observing the couple.
“Are they alright?”
As smoke from the still burning car bellows behind, her answer:
“I’m not sure.”
The last visuals are Hando’s body lying on the ground, and a shot of the ocean from what would be his POV, credits rolling over a world turned sideways.
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Audiences were not unfamiliar with films led by immoral and unlikable characters (“The Godfather,” “Badlands”), criminal youth gangs (“The Wanderers,” “The Warriors,” “A Clockwork Orange”), or even skinheads (“Made In Britain,” a TV movie starring a 21 year old Tim Roth in his first screen role). Nevertheless, “Romper Stomper” spawned a substantial amount of controversy, critical condemnation, and even calls for boycott by Melbourne politicians.
Despite those obstacles, it opened in first place at the Aussie box office, displacing “Strictly Ballroom.” Baz Luhrmann’s romantic comedy would come out on top for Best Film in the 34th Australian Film Institute Awards, but Crowe won for Best Actor, and the “Romper Stomper” sound team won for Best Achievement in Sound. Pollock, who suffered through heroin addiction and the breakup of a romantic relationship with costar McKenzie, committed suicide by walking in front of a train in Sydney in April of 1992. His death was several months before the film came out and before he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, which was won that year by Barry Otto for “Strictly Ballroom.” (Crowe and his rock band 30 Odd Foot Of Grunts memorialized Pollock in the 2001 song “When Davey Hit the Train.”)
White won for Best Original Musical Score, but for as distinct a signature as the “Romper Stomper Theme” (aka “Dead Nazi March”) would become, it was the Oi songs that continued to circulate over decades. Wright tried to play the songs off as the genuine article, asking listeners in the liner notes of the soundtrack album to excuse their inclusion “in the same way as they'd accept a grisly item in a museum.” However, the catchy punk tunes with abysmal, bigoted lyrics were actually a fabrication by White, with him tackling vocals and studio musicians drafted for the rest. The tracks have been passed around online for years by racists on file sharing networks thinking they were Skrewdriver songs, or credited to a band that does not exist called The Master Race (based off a comment in the recording by guest vocalist Peter Pales, speaking in a German accent saying “this is the master race” - he also sings a verse of “Pulling On The Boots'' in German). But bassist Chris Pettifer told all to Vice in 2014, revealing the band to be “middle class musos… leaning to the left,” put together as an inexpensive solution to avoid paying real racists for their music. The ruse should be evident upon close inspection of the lyrics, with such darkly tongue-in-cheek gems as this Hitler-as-daddy scenario:
“Führer, führer, what'll we do?
Now, before we look at you
Did your best to discourage the jew
Führer, führer, what'll we do?“
…and in a weirdly Up With People kind of utopian line (if the people are Aryan, I suppose) in “Fourth Reich Fighting Men”:
“When the marching's over, it'll be alright
Everyone will live together in the Fourth Reich”
GG Allin had said a lot of worse stuff, arguably, in his work. Both Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys and queer vocalist Gary Floyd of The Dicks have dropped racist epithets into their bands’ most popular songs. (There are over 30 more examples in Mariah Novell’s horrifying list and magnificent prose piece, “White ‘Punks’ Singing the N-Word: A Black Punk’s Incomplete Playlist,” as published in the L.A. Review of Books.) But Pettifer says editor and makeshift songwriter Bill Murphy wasn’t trying to be shocking with the lyrical content he provided White and his band, rather that it was an attempt towards “taking the piss,” making the racists the butt of the joke.
Arguments over intent versus impact, and whether or not fictional portrayals of racists (on screen or in song) are tantamount to glorification, come part and parcel with discussions of “Romper Stomper.” Images from the film, as well as songs from the soundtrack, are celebrated online by white supremacists, including in the manifesto of convicted Charleston church shooter Dylan Roof. While more decent and responsible audiences should connect the dots between the skinheads’ deeds and their bloody fates, several others have missed the point. But it takes an overwhelming amount of cognitive dissonance to pretend that Russell Crowe as Hando, leaning against a fridge with a skeleton-bone arm tattoo and holding a glass of milk against his head like James Dean in “Rebel Without A Cause,” wasn’t supposed to look sexy and cool.
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Crowe has said that an apocryphal story about him being an actual skinhead, who Wright recruited off the streets for the film, made the rounds in Hollywood, sabotaging his career for a spell. He took on a diverse set of roles, including one as a gay man in “The Sum Of Us,” to counter this. He ended up finding mainstream success when Sharon Stone advocated for his casting in Sam Raimi’s “The Quick and the Dead,” and then co-starring with Denzel Washington in “Virtuosity.” It was “Gladiator” in 2000 and “A Beautiful Mind” in 2001 that sent Crowe into the stratosphere.
McKenzie also went onto worldwide fame as a revered stage actress, as well as a star in U.S. films like 1999’s “Deep Blue Sea,” and in Francis Ford Coppola’s four season sci-fi series “The 4400.”
Wyllie has been prolific in international theater and Australian television, also continuing in movies like “Muriel’s Wedding” in 1994, Terrence Malick’s 1998 war picture “The Thin Red Line,” and alongside both Crowe and McKenzie in 2014 for “The Water Diviner,” which Crowe starred in and directed.
Brumpton also acts frequently, with over 100 roles in film, on TV, and onstage, but he also wrote 1996’s award-winning feature “Life,” and 2007’s short film “William,” which was part of that year’s Sundance Film Festival.
And McKenzie, Wyllie, and Brumpton would reunite again in a surprising turn of events, for a television series that wasn’t the unlikely success that their first film had been, receiving nowhere near the media coverage and accolades.
For 25 years, where Gabe and Davey would go next was left to our imaginations.
“Are they alright?”
The Australian streaming channel Stan decided to commission Wright and a new team of producers, writers, and directors to answer that question with the release of six episodes released simultaneously on New Year’s Day 2018.
That’s right… “Romper Stomper: The Series.”
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Image courtesy Geoffrey Wright/Stan
“We‘re not fucking terrorists!”
-Kane (Toby Wallace)
The first shot of the premiere episode is young skinhead Kane (played by Toby Wallace, who will portray Steve Jones in the Sex Pistols miniseries premering on FX in May 2022) and his mate walking off a beach, as if picking right up where the film left off, then walking into a Muslim festival. A group called Patriot Blue is rallying to disrupt the festival when an organized anti-fascist group, here called Antifasc, ambushes the white nationalists.
Stan celebrated the viewing numbers in a press release, and the series was distributed to the UK through BBC and the U.S. through a variety of streaming channels. But the critical response indicates that Australia was not in the mood. Neither was America, based on the absence of media coverage stateside. Perhaps because while the 1990s film had shocked the world in a time of relative racial progress, the six-part television miniseries landed one year into the Trump Administration (Wright has said Trump’s election was the catalyst for him to finish his idea for the revival), and just months after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and the vehicular homicide of counterprotestor Heather Heyer.
That summer also saw multiple protests across Australia over the acquittal of a utility vehicle driver (per Aussie law, not allowed to be identified by authorities or press) who had chased, crashed into, and killed 16 year old Aboriginal boy Elijah Doughty, who was riding a motorbike the 56 year old white ute driver had claimed was his property. Op-eds and the Australian Human Rights Commission continued to call out the problem of racism and other bigotry still in the country, including Islamophobic and homophobic comments at a February 2017 fundraising dinner for the now-defunct right-wing Q Society group.
Wright and his new colleagues, brothers Dan and John Edwards for Roadshow Rough Diamond, directors Daina Reid and James Napier Robertson, and writers Omar Musa and Malcolm Knox, took advantage of their six hours of television to open up the point-of-the view in the “Romper Stomper” story universe. So we don’t only meet Kane, but also the members of Antifasc, who try to recruit Muslim law student Laila (played by Nicole Chamoun) as they watch her advocate for her community in the press, and Cindi (played by Markella Kavenagh), a white juvenile who escapes a detention center and is taken in by Antifasc at a soup line they run for the houseless and hungry.
But the focus is mainly on Kane as he ingratiates himself with middle aged far-right Blake (played by Aussie star Lachy Hulme) and the much younger pretty blonde Zoe (played by model-actress-singer/songwriter Sophie Lowe) that the Patriot Blue leader married after rescuing her from a situation with parallels to the Gabe/Martin relationship of the film. Kane rises in the ranks with the organizing prowess of Hando, setting night patrols out into Melbourne to act as vigilantes, but compromises his position when he begins a forbidden romance with Zoe, their bond showing a vulnerability reminiscent of Davey.
These are far from the only complications, Wright and the team connecting all these characters through more than just their political conflicts. Lalia’s boyfriend Farid (played by Julian Maroun) works at the care home where McKenzie’s Gabe, now nearing 50, visits an ailing Martin. We don’t know exactly how she became entangled with him again, but that at some point she had a son she gave up for adoption - Kane, whose involvement in Patriot Blue greatly upsets her (so, not quite a reincarnation of Gabe’s dear ol’ mum). Cindi, of course, is Kane’s younger, Bubs-sized foster sister, who he’s assigned to infiltrate Antifasc for intel. The first episode ends with Kane telling his mother, “I know who my father is.” We spend many episodes wondering if it’s Hando, like Kane believes, or Davey, which would make sense given where we last saw him. But it’s neither, sadly - Gabe reveals it’s her own father, Martin, responsible for the pregnancy.
It’s unclear whether the birth took place before or after the events of the film, but Gabe reveals that Davey and most of the old gang are dead as she speculates over who has put Kane up to his mission. When Kane murders Blake, takes Zoe as his partner, and assumes leadership of Patriot Blue, we finally see the mastermind - an appliance salesman named Vic, formerly known as Cackles, once again played by Wyllie (appliances, by the way, are also known as “white goods” - more Wright humor?). Vic is also manipulating his old pal Magoo (the returning Blumpton), who somehow survived his beating decades prior, but is a shell of his former self. Magoo has terminal cancer and an estranged Asian daughter he wants to find a way to provide for after he dies, so in exchange for a well-funded bank account in his daughter’s name, he agrees to be a suicide bomber on behalf of the anti-immigration cause, a plan Kane tries to veto. All the while, a corrupt Australian Federal Police that was using Blake as an informant now wants the same from Kane - by the way, the fed is also sleeping with Gabe.
The line between prestige cable drama and sensational soap opera grows ever thinner, so the sincere examination of race relations and honest accounting of white anti-fascists’ flaws (some caring more about clout than how actions affect the community they’re purporting to defend) is coupled with the aforementioned plot twists and escalating consequences. But those who know and love the film may enjoy the nods to it. The old theme is back with a new version, and Patriot Blue members driving to the woods blast “Fourth Reich Fighting Men'' from their car stereo. A fight scene between Patriot Blue and Antifasc shows a Tiger-like stream of reinforcements driving up to strengthen their faction’s numbers. An Antifasc action involving breaking and entering into the home of a conservative talk show host, and how Kane exploits the aftermath, certainly wrecks everything and ruins some Antifasc lives.
The critics of 2018 expressed the same qualms as those in 1992. Does showing despicable characters and exploring the story’s universe through their point of view mean a work is trying to sway the audience to embrace the characters and excuse their behavior? Is the ironic use of “Fourth Reich Fighting Men” during the defeats of Hando and company, and the sight of a patchless Davey embracing Gabe, enough to declare that the message is “love conquers hate”? Did the TV-viewing public grow too accustomed to the Tony Sopranos, Walter Whites, and Don Drapers? They weren’t ready for Adrian Pasdar as “Profit” in 1996, but cheered for “Dexter” ten years later, at least for the first four seasons. But there was practically no American interest in Kane. In 2022, are we just exhausted after years of real life right-wing bad guys?
By the time Gabe is sneaking into Martin’s room to murder him in his bed and make it look like a natural death, Zoe is following a calling from God to assasinate the fed, and Kane is racing against traffic to keep Magoo from detonating a bomb at a fundraiser (where Farid, Lalia, Cindi, and their Antifasc friends have gathered to meet the Member of Parliament that Magoo is targeting), a Hitler Youth knife in the neck feels quaint. With no second season, our last glimpse of the “Romper Stomper” universe is the bright lights of Magoo’s bomb reflecting against Cindi and Lalia’s faces like dual Maggie Gyllenhalls in “The Dark Knight,” and Kane screaming in slow motion outside the burning building, dead bodies and cars engulfed in flames around him like Davey and Gabe years before him.
Are we alright? I’m not sure.
But in the world of “Romper Stomper,” no one is redeemed. Salvation is besides the point.
h. is a writer and potential cryptid hailing from the paper town of Higley AZ. His writing has appeared in Cultural Daily, Discover Pods, Pink Plastic Press, and Wrongdoing Magazine, and he serves as an editor for Meow Meow Pow Pow and Screenshot Lit. His work is collected at HubUnofficial.com.