My quick rating - 3.2/10. I popped on Dropbear expecting some low-budget Aussie creature feature nonsense. What I got was…well…exactly that. The difference is that somewhere along the way it becomes so unbelievably ridiculous that you can't help but laugh. AT IT!
It opens with a few mates around a campfire before one wanders off for a midnight piss. He spots a red-eyed koala-looking creature in a tree, there's a bit of snarling, and next thing you know he's hanging upside down as the title card appears. It's cheesy from the very first scene, which sets the tone perfectly.
We then meet four American tourists signing up for a "real Australian adventure" led by two blokes who couldn't look more suspicious if they tried. The brunette is the only one showing any common sense while everyone else happily walks straight into every bad decision imaginable.
The tiny budget becomes obvious almost immediately. During the driving scenes, the truck clearly isn't moving. Everyone just bounces around while the driver wildly jerks the steering wheel. Once you notice it, it's impossible not to laugh.
The guides eventually try the classic fake dropbear prank using what looks like a stuffed toy, but things go sideways when they discover the legends are actually real. Although I'm honestly not sure what looked faker - the stuffed animal or the CGI dropbears that attack later.
Then the movie completely loses its mind.
The group stumbles across a secret government research facility, and we're introduced to the king of the dropbears. He's basically a full-grown bloke wearing a bear costume…who can talk. I genuinely burst out laughing. The flashback showing him as a baby somehow tops it by using an incredibly obvious hand puppet. It's so spectacularly silly that it circles back around to being entertaining.
Writer and director John DeCaux also throws in an ending that feels heavily inspired by Peter Jackson's Bad Taste. It's a fun nod to one of cult cinema's greatest splatter comedies, and I'll happily give credit where it's due. Sadly, borrowing a great ending doesn't magically fix everything that came before it.
The acting is brutal across the board, with performances ranging from wooden to outright painful, although by the time a talking mutant dropbear is delivering dialogue, I almost stopped caring.
Even the end credits get a laugh thanks to a surprisingly funny song, and there's a bizarre post-credit sequel tease featuring what sounds like a Donald Trump impersonator calling the research lab.
Dropbear is objectively a mess. The effects are laughable, the acting is poor, and the production values barely scrape by. But somewhere underneath all that is a movie that understands just how absurd its premise is.
It's not good. It's not even close. But I'll admit. I laughed far more than I expected.
Sometimes that's enough.
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