Wyrmwood: have you seen Australia's most pirated movie yet?

Imagine you’re part of a creative, cinema-loving family and you’ve been making short films with your sibling since you were 13. You shot and edited them on weekends using minuscule amounts of money and learned early on that tomato sauce can be an effective substitute for fake blood.

You have an idea for a feature film. Given the short films you’ve made are, say, eight or nine minutes each, and a feature is about an hour-and-a-half, you figure that’s really just 10 or so shorts strung together.

Inspired by Robert Rodriguez’s guerrilla filmmaking bible Rebel Without a Crew – which chronicles how the director made his feature debut El Mariachi on a budget of seven grand – Sydney-based brothers Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner came up with an idea for a post-apocalyptic zombie movie and set about making it, lathering their friends in gnarly make-up and building weird props and sets from scratch.

They figured $20,000 and six months ought to cut it. Four years later, the cost of their cinematic debut had ballooned to $150,000 – and that’s before Screen Australia chipped in about $800,000 to help finish it.

The resulting one-and-a-half hours of delirious flesh-chewing fun – a hot-blooded genre pic called Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead – flies in the face of the golden rules of making shoestring-budget productions (in other words few actors, a bare minimum number of locations and no elaborate effects).

The Roache-Turner brothers (Kiah as director and editor; Tristan as producer and production designer; both as writers) set their frenetic first feature in a violent and visually detailed fantasy future where a different character gets mauled in virtually every scene.

“For somebody to start making a film like that, it basically means they’re one of two things: very rich or very, very stupid,” says Kiah. “I think we come into the second category. Our ambition way outstripped what we actually had in front of us.”

“At the start we slotted out all the scenes we had to shoot on a big Excel spreadsheet,” says Tristan. “We looked at it and we were like: ‘Are we actually going to do this?’ This is huge. It’s gargantuan. We looked at each other and said: ‘Yep, fuck it. Let’s do it.’ ”

The zombie genre is oversaturated, clogged up by a zillion forgettable fright fests, but Kiah and Tristan saw room for a crossover. “The one thing we’d never seen before was somebody taking the Mad Max post-apocalyptic aesthetic and blending that with Dawn of the Dead,” says Kiah. Tristan suggested that in their world-gone-to-hell-in-a-low-budget-handbasket zombie film, methane gas could power the vehicles, giving Wyrmwood genre filmmaking’s equivalent of a marketable point of difference, and the game was on.

In a local film industry that had a booming previous year insofar as great content was concerned (pedigree titles include The Babadook, The Infinite Man, Charlie’s Country and Predestination) but a disappointing one when it came to cinema attendance (most Australian films fizzled at the local box office), a cut-through release strategy was always going to be a separate challenge.

Kiah describes Wyrmwood’s plan as “unusual” and says: “We’re kind of the canary in the coal mine in that respect.” The film premiered at Moonlight Cinema, ran Friday 13 screenings at major exhibitors (playing on about 70 screens across the country) and is currently screening at various cinemas in Australia through a user-generated model called Fan Force.

Much has been made of crowdsourcing film finance. Fan Force focuses on the other end of the tunnel: crowdsourcing distribution. Anyone, anywhere, can suggest a screening and if enough people sign on, the film is brought to them.

“One of the problems with Australian films in particular is you release these amazing films and they just kind of sit there. And because nobody knows they’re there, nobody goes,” says Kiah.

“You can’t compete with the marketing budget of a Guardians of the Galaxy or an Avengers or an X-Men. So you’ve got to build your own fan base. With a company like Fan Force, every time somebody wants a screening, they get a screening. I think that’s the way of the future in terms of Australian independent film production. If the fans want to see it, all they do is put their hand up.”

At the time of publishing there are nine proposed screenings at venues in New South Wales, Victoria, Canberra and Western Australia. And while the film’s roll-out hasn’t been all peaches and cream (Wyrmwood received the dubious distinction of being one of the most pirated movies in the world in February), it at least encourages local filmmakers and distributors to think outside the box.

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The target audience of undead appreciators – hooters and squealers who love slap-happy gore – are fundamental to the business model. And they aren’t likely to leave disappointed. While Wyrmwood’s storyline at times feels a little disjointed and out-of-it, as if it were developed piecemeal, the frenetic energy of the film has a hellzapoppin’ pace that distracts from script-based oddities and inconsistencies.

The Roache-Turner brothers understand that with this style of film you can be many things – incredulous, trashy, befuddling, utterly and profoundly weird – but you cannot be boring. To help maintain a lickety-split sense of mayhem they used more than 200 litres of fake blood, 50 litres of fake sweat, 100 rolls of black gaffer tape and 2,000 cable ties.

There’s also a spectacular zombie truck which looks like a beat-up offspring of Mad Max or director Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris. The energy and DIY spirit at the heart of Wyrmwood is epitomised by this mangled and bizarrely modified vehicle, a Toyota Hilux transformed by Tristan and a couple of his best mates.

“They’d come around to my house every second afternoon for around a month or six weeks,” he says, “and we’d attack the truck with drills, blinders and a welding machine.”

• Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead will be released on DVD on 2 April. For details of current and future screenings, visit its Fan Force page