Collect Your Roadkill (2021) follows the trials and tribulations of musician Jim Buckley (Kit Morgan) and manager Sid Utio (Ryan Haire), trying to kickstart Jim's career and outrun Sid's brother, Ringo (Cosmo Posa). The film is limited from the off. This much you instantly know.
The opening credits serve as short reading, with many amongst the cast and crew covering two or three jobs. For example, director Hugo Morgan also served as the writer, producer, editor, composer and briefly, an actor. You sit in the audience, watching the same names come up over and over again and find yourself distracted. You wonder what kind of amateur-schlock you might be in for over the next hour and a half. This is, of course, until the sweet, dulcet tones of Jim Buckley's voice hit you.
Here, Collect Your Roadkill's limitations, though staring you right in the face, wisp away. You're immersed into the beautifully captured Broken Hill (always hot, always dry) with an accompanying soundtrack so good, it has no right being in a film made for nothing. Mazza and Morgan have a good sense of humor about them - they know what the film is. By the same token, as do the audience, cast and crew who all seem to be having as much fun as you. It's by no means perfect, far from it, but Collect Your Roadkill's self awareness keeps it light, amusing and refreshing from start to finish.
Admittedly, the cast are inexperienced, most of them first-timers, but they play their roles to the standard the film requires, a standard of solid entertainment. Mazza and Morgan, on the other hand, exhibit real potential and skill in the way Collect Your Roadkill is shot. At times, the film looks as if it were shot on a borrowed camera, but at other points, it looks as if it were produced on a blank-cheque, capturing both the night and day of the Australian terrain as if they were robust veterans of the industry. The pair clearly know what they're doing, and their limitation should not be mistaken for incompetence, for I'm sure, should they one day be given a bigger budget, us, as the viewer, should expect big things.
