NZ, 1986
Review:JA Kerswell
Five teenagers find themselves prey to a revenge-fuelled cattle rancher when their backwoods trip goes badly wrong in this slasher-adjacent thriller from New Zealand. Clearly inspired by North American teen horror films, BRIDGE TO NOWHERE drips with mid-80s ambience and, despite a few rough edges, benefits from a genuinely gripping final scene and a subversion of a number of expectations.
Grabbing their boombox and beer, city youngsters head into the wilderness to hike to the eponymous bridge (a real location in the middle of nowhere with no connecting roads, left to rot after the area was largely abandoned by the 1940s). Tanya (Margaret Umbers) bitches to her Mom about having to take her younger brother, Carl (Matthew Hunter), who is something of a shy recluse. She is worried it will cramp her style with her date, Leon (Phillip Gordon). Also joining them are her best friend, Julie (Shelly Luxford), and Leon’s friend, Gray (Stephen Judd).
Arriving by jeep at the starting point for the hike, they attract the attention of local cattle rancher Mac (Bruno Lawrence) and his young wife or lover, Lise (Alison Routledge), whose good looks draw admiring glances. However, when Leon—who has taken his parents’ rifle without permission—tries to shoot one of Mac’s escaped bulls, he is tackled by the cattle rancher, who attempts to disable his weapon. Already tightly wound, Leon finds this humiliation too much to handle. After finally reaching the bridge, the group start to party, but Leon begins to spiral and attempts to rape Tanya, who manages to fight him off. Leon storms off into the woods, where he sees the cattle rancher’s home and spies Lise naked, washing herself outside. The young woman is aware that Leon is watching and seems to enjoy the covert attention. Knowing he is still there, Lise proceeds to seduce Mac, but Leon accidentally gives himself away, resulting in a standoff and a gunshot ringing out in the night. It is unclear who has been shot.
By morning, the teenagers debate whether to go searching for Leon or leave him to find his own way home. When they do go looking, they return to find all their belongings missing and assume their missing friend is playing a trick on them. However, as they try to make their way back to the jeep, they discover that the rancher is following them on horseback, using his dogs to corral them like cattle and preventing the group from leaving the area …
Featuring brief but still surprising full-frontal male nudity, BRIDGE TO NOWHERE is clearly modelled on early ‘80s North American slashers, such as JUST BEFORE DAWN (1981), via DELIVERANCE (1972) (and its variants). The teenagers—at least on the surface—are straight out of ‘80s slasher-movie casting: boozing, whooping and hollering, and quite literally dancing their way through the woods, boombox held aloft (the film is full of teen-friendly pop and rock songs). However, the New Zealand versions tend to be much more acerbic and jagged than their North American cousins. It is also a welcome twist that, despite the seeming teen cyphers, the characters do change through their experiences—with the bullied and largely ostracised Carl becoming pivotal to the group’s survival.
Made in 1985, the vistas in BRIDGE TO NOWHERE are impressively striking but are as unhospitable as the cattleman—especially a barren, blackened, and desolate valley scarred by a wildfire. The film largely shares the approach of North American films that blend the slasher template with backwoods survival drama, such as THE ZERO BOYS and HUNTER’S BLOOD (both also released in 1986). Its setup of teens hunted in the woods fits here, but the fact that most of the deaths (outside of one flying knife) are gun-related perhaps makes the film slasher-adjacent at best.
Bruno Lawrence is great as the initially reluctant hunter, who displays a quiet, expressionless menace as he corrals the group before his purpose is clear. He had previously appeared with Alison Routledge in the undersung Kiwi post-apocalyptic classic THE QUIET EARTH (1985). Routledge perhaps struggles in a complex role here as his unstable girlfriend, and it is never clear whether she is his captive or there willingly (although, apparently, she won an award for the role). At just sixteen when he made this, Matthew Hunter is especially impressive as the put-upon younger brother who turns into a hero. Margaret Umbers, who plays his initially antagonistic sister, was also in MR WRONG (1984), another New Zealand twist on the slasher movie formula. Prolific actor/director Ian Mune (who was recently in the excellent THE RULE OF JENNY PEN (2024)) had scored a hit with the comedy CAME A HOT FRIDAY the year before, in 1985. Mune co-wrote BRIDGE TO NOWHERE with American writer Bill Baer. The website NZonscreen.com says that the film was pre-sold to an American investor, but Mune’s LA agent warned against killing a dog in the film. Mune ignored him, and (albeit totally implied) the teenagers trap and kill one of Mac’s dogs (an adorable-looking border collie who couldn’t look less threatening). The agent appears to have been right, as the film bypassed cinemas in North America to go straight to video in 1987. Moral being: never kill the dog.
BODY COUNT 4:
Female 1 / Male 3
BRIDGE TO NOWHERE (1986) VHS Trailer
