Badger!: Killer Badger and Hilarious DIY FX in Macabre Horror-Comedy

There is good reason for the title of Barry Wilkinson’s Badger! to come with that exclamation point. Its titular badger has truly adapted its diet to the times when anything goes, especially habitat, food sources, and clans. The new favourite of this versatile omnivore are the locals of a small English town. Great for the badger, too bad for the people getting chowed down before they can get a help, murderous badger! out. 

The 15-minute horror-comedy starts out stylistically almost deadpan, allowing its characters to do the work of making themselves laughable. The antagonist (Stacey Daly) is just a regular, well-off middle class woman at first glance, until she glosses right over the horrific death of a man (Jonathan Noall) to fret over his lost labradoodle with her husband (Nuku Wondrausch). It becomes especially humorous when she effortlessly segues into the announcement of her appointment as head of a badger culling effort. 

Meanwhile the killer badger is about to make a bloody collage of college aged Dumb and Dumber (Waqar Munir and Scott Wilson) out on a walk near deserted rail tracks and delivering some of the film’s funniest lines: “You’re the biggest feminist I know. You’ve got so many posters of the female form in your room.” to “Sometimes I come out to these woods just to scream…You’re so far away from help. You can tell that that means it’s safe.” to “We should start a podcast.” To be sure, it is low-hanging fruit, but that fruit is so very deliciously precise in its stupidity. Then it gets better (or worse, depending on tastes). One has apparently been walking with a triangle of cheese all this while, and the other just breaks off a piece to lure out whatever animal is in the bushes with all the wiles of a salesman destined to fail within his first week.

When the star of the film, who is definitely not a small dog in a badger costume, finally makes an appearance, Dumb and Dumber win the prize of being the first on-screen deaths. The music strikes, the blood spurts, and the poor cheese is abandoned without care. 

The killing spree continues and you start to suspect that maybe the badger is a little too like humans—certainly all that flesh cannot be going into one small, albeit very active, mammal. A yoga influencer, one of two children (the other unbothered, texting her friends, living her best life), and finally, it comes for the badger culler, Jenny. By this point, the film has already shown a whole parade of badgers out on the town, so maybe food is not entirely off their list of reasons. 

Badger! remains hilarious throughout, if a little rough on structure. Daly delivers a comically brutal climax. The blood, gore, and humour are upped. Eyes get underfoot, bones become weapons, and a life or death battle is hashed out in the kitchen. Who will win? Who will gloat? Whose victory will be hung out for all passersby to see? One long minute will decide it all. 

Watch Badger! Short Film Trailer