Animal Kingdom is not about the four legged

Crime, Featured, Movies — By ken on August 13, 2010 at 8:44 pm

Animal Kingdom is a 2010 Australian crime thriller written and directed by David Michôd, and stars Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Guy Pearce, Luke Ford, Sullivan Stapleton, Jacki Weaver and James Frecheville. The film won the 2010 World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic at the Sundance Film Festival.

The setting is the Melbourne underworld in the mid-1980’s, where tensions are building between dangerous criminals and equally dangerous police. Armed robber Andrew ‘Pope’ Cody (Ben Mendelsohn) is in hiding, on the run from a gang of renegade detectives who want him dead. His business partner and best friend, Barry ‘Baz’ Brown (Joel Edgerton), wants out of the game, recognising that their days of old-school banditry are all but over. Pope’s younger brother, the speed-addicted and volatile Craig Cody (Sullivan Stapleton), is making a fortune in the drug trade, while the youngest Cody brother, Darren (Luke Ford), naively navigates his way through this criminal world – the only world his family has ever known. And into this world arrives their nephew, Joshua ‘J’ Cody (James Frecheville). Following the death of his mother, J finds himself living with his estranged family, under the watchful eye of his doting grandmother, Janine ‘Smurf’ Cody (Jacki Weaver), mother to the Cody boys. The movie tells the story of seventeen year-old J as he navigates his survival amongst his outlaw family and the detective Nathan Leckie (Guy Pearce) who thinks he can save him.

‘Animal Kingdom’ Makes U.S. Debut

AssociatedPress Australian film director David Michod and actor Ben Mendelsohn talk about the winner of the 2010 World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic at the Sundance Film Festival.

Animal Kingdom (2010) – Internet Movie Database

Tells the story of seventeen year-old J (Josh) as he navigates his survival amongst an explosive criminal family and the detective who thinks he can save him.

Animal Kingdom (2010) – Official Film Site

‘Animal Kingdom’ is a powerful crime drama exploring the tense battle between a criminal family and the police, and the ordinary lives caught in the middle.

Movie Review: Los Angeles Times

“Animal Kingdom” is an art house crime saga that will put your heart in your mouth, a moody, brooding, modern-day film noir that marks the impressive debut of an Australian writer-director who knows how to make a film that is, in his own words, “dark and violent yet beautiful and poetic at the same time.”

Movie Review: Sydney Morning Herald

The movie is fiction in a legal sense only: most of it happened, and the rest could have. Names have been changed to protect the guilty and their rights to books and movies of their own.

Movie Review: Urban Cinefile

Animal Kingdom is a superbly written and crafted crime drama – the kind that Australians are well accustomed to making … for television. It’s a pleasure to see an Australian genre movie in which story and character are given equal importance and are so well defined and delivered. That it won a major award at Sundance shows its creative credentials: its popularity will show its audience appeal.

Movie Review: Herald Sun

A gritty crime drama that makes the Underbelly TV franchise look like a grotesque cartoon, Animal Kingdom is sure to leave viewers both impressed and distressed.

Movie Review: The Age

Animal Kingdom is a remarkably confident film, supported by exemplary editing, sound and camerawork. It builds deliberately and slowly, with scenes of aching tension and suspense, and sudden bursts of action. Much of its power comes from looks and glances. Its violence is often implied, its menace suggested, in the relentless coldness of Mendelsohn’s gaze or the appalling pragmatism of Weaver’s character.

Movie Review: Sunday Times

While Josh’s collection of uncles and “business partners” are all knee-deep in various forms of criminal activities they are ultimately beholden to their unhinged older sibling “Pope” Cody (a twitchy Ben Mendelsohn) and their supportive but imposing mum (Jacki Weaver).

Movie Review: At The Movies

A suspenseful, enthralling study of the disintegration of a family of criminals. As we’re introduced to the Cody’s through the innocent Josh, we discover not only a quartet of drug-dealing criminal brothers and their friend, but also, in Smurf, a matriarch who will do anything – anything at all – to protect her sons.

Movie Review: Cinetology

Mendelsohn gives a career-best performance but kudos deserve to go all around. Jackie Weaver, Luke Ford, Joel Edgerton and newcomer James Frecheville are great as well, but virtually everybody in the cast is. Animal Kingdom is the sort of film in which the quality of acting is so high even pieces of furniture seem to contribute carefully nuanced performances.

Movie Review: Rotten Tomatoes

With confident pacing, a smart script, and a top-notch cast, Animal Kingdom represents the best the Australian film industry has to offer. Welcome to the terrifying Melbourne crime underworld, where tensions are on the brink of exploding between felons and renegade cops – the Wild West played out on the city’s streets in broad daylight.

Animal Kingdom – Official Full Length Trailer

A high quality powerful psychological crime drama set in the Melbourne underworld. With an all star ensemble cast including Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Guy Pearce, Luke Ford, Jacki Weaver, Sullivan Stapleton and introducing James Frecheville.

The Animal Kingdom’s Cody family is loosely based on the Pettingill crime family and the Walsh Street police killings of the late 80s. The matriarch Kathleen ‘Granny Evil’ Pettingill had six criminal sons (Dennis Allen, Peter Allen, Lex Peirce, Victor Peirce, Jamie Pettingill and Trevor Pettingill) and a daughter Vicky, by a number of fathers (from a total of ten children), of which three are now dead.

Kathy Pettingill had ten children over 14 years of which three were adopted out.

Married Dennis Ryan

1951 Dennis Allen (deceased)
1953 Peter Allen

Defacto Billy Pierce

1954 Vicki Brooks (nee Peirce)
1956 Shelley Peirce (adopted)
1957 Stephen Peirce (adopted)
1958 Victor Peirce (deceased)
1960 Lex Peirce
1961 David Peirce (adopted)

Defacto Jimmy Pettingill

1963 Jamie Pettingill (deceased)
1965 Trevor Pettingill

Dennis Allen was an infamous Melbourne drug dealer, pimp, police informer and gunman who died in 1987 of a heart attack while in custody awaiting trial for murder. Two brothers were acquitted of the 1988 Walsh Street police shootings, based on perjured evidence. Though acquitted, Victor Peirce had a string of convictions and served six years for drug trafficking before being murdered in 2002, whilst Trevor Pettingill served several jail terms with multiple convictions for firearms and drug-related offences and considered an emotional wreck. The third deceased brother Jamie Pettingill died of a heroin overdose in 1985, aged 21.

The 1988 Walsh Street shootings of two young Victoria Police officers, was in retaliation for the police shooting dead Victor Peirce’s best friend.

Four men were charged with the Walsh Street murders and later acquitted by a jury in the Supreme Court of Victoria. Two other suspects, were shot and killed by Victoria Police before being brought to trial. In 2005, Wendy Peirce, widow of accused Victor Peirce, revealed to the media that her late husband had planned and carried out the murders and was actually guilty as charged. She was fearful that Victor would kill her if she didn’t supply an alibi. Peirce believed the armed robbery squad had become a vigilante gang with a secret plan to cull members of Melbourne’s underworld.

Victor Peirce’s nephew, Jason Ryan, was the star prosecution witness who turned against the family and gave evidence over Walsh Street.

This Walsh Street police shootings documentary is about the 1988 murder of two Victoria Police officers, Constable Steven Tynan, 22, and Probationary Constable Damian Eyre, 20. The officers were responding to a report of an abandoned car when they were gunned down at 4.30am in Walsh Street, South Yarra, Australia on 12 October 1988.

By 2010, the story is much clearer after 22 years has elapsed and many truths revealed.

Kath Pettingill, said on radio she was determined to avenge her son, Victor George Peirce’s death, saying she believed other criminals had shot him. His brothel keeper mother became the matriarch of one of Australia’s most prolific underworld clans. Peirce, 42, was shot dead as he sat in his car in a Port Melbourne street in what is believed to be a drug-related execution.

Kathleen Pettingill is the matriarch of the Melbourne based criminal family, the Pettingill family.

2004 - BADFELLAS – The Melbourne underworld - Takes a look inside the deadly Melbourne gangland shootings and several of the characters involved.

Pt 1 includes interviews with feared ex cop Brian “the skull” Murphy, as well as former standover man turned crime author Mark “Chopper” Read.

Pt 2 takes a look inside the deadly Melbourne gangland shootings and several of the characters involved, including interviews with ex undercover drug squad cop Lachlan McCulloch and former head of the Purana taskforce Simon Overland.

Pt 3 looks inside the deadly Melbourne gangland shootings and several of the characters involved. It includes interviews with ex undercover drug squad cop Lachlan McCulloch and former head of the Purana taskforce Simon Overland.

Pt 4 includes interviews with infamous former crime matriach Kathy “granny evil” Pettingill, old school underworld legend and gunman Billy “The Texan” Longley and Carl Williams’ wife Roberta Williams.

Pt 5 includes interviews with police commissioner Christine Nixon, old school underworld legend and gunman Billy “The Texan” Longley and Carl Williams’ wife Roberta williams.

The Sunday Show - (a follow up to the Badfellas documentary) – Takes a look at the deadly Melbourne underworld war murders and the guilty plea by gangland kingpin Carl Williams. Part one includes an interview with Mark “Chopper” Read as well as featuring an old interview of Roberta Williams from the Badfellas doco in 2004. Read gives his view on the gangland war and several of it’s frontline characters, including Williams, Mick Gatto, Andrew Venaimin etc. Part 2 contains excerpts of a 2004 interview with old-school underworld figure Billy “The texan” Longley

2007 Channel 9 presentation - A special documentary look at Melbourne’s gangland kingpin Carl Williams. Released on the evening of him being sentenced to 35 years jail, this special takes a inside look at the background of Carl Williams and the investigation of the murders, interviews with his parents George and Barbara Williams, the deal made by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) in exchange for his guilty plea as well as a look inside the prison which was to be Carl’s home for the next 35 years. Also looks at the history of the gangland war.

Carl Williams was a convicted murderer and drug trafficker from the Australian state of Victoria. He was the central figure in a number of Melbourne gangland killings.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 35 years for ordering the murders of three people and conspiracy to murder a fourth. On 19 April 2010, Williams died while incarcerated at Barwon Prison after being beaten to death with part of an exercise bike by another inmate.

Gangland murderer Carl Williams dies in prison bashing

2007 - The Sunday show Chopper Uncut - A special in depth interview with former criminal turned crime author and painter Mark “Chopper” Read, along with his wife Margaret. Read speaks about having to trademark his name due to comedian Heath Franklin making money from his name and his current health issues.

Prior to 1960, even though Perth, Western Australia was the capital of Australia’s largest state, the population was relatively small and the attitudes were more those of a country town, than the more sophisticated cities of Sydney, Melbourne, New York or London.

Unfortunately it was to change forever, as during the 1960s, Western Australia was experiencing a crime wave involving two killers. One involved a series of random murders whilst the other resulted in a manhunt where the public turned up in droves with firearms to hunt the fugitive.

Murderers who Killed the innocence of a trusting town

LATEST GANGLAND KILLINGS – Friday August 13, 2010

Crime boss gunned down at home

NewsOnABC
Underworld figure Macchour Chaouk has been killed at his Brooklyn home in Melbourne’s west.

Two dead in second Melbourne shooting

NewsOnABC
Two people have been killed in the latest shooting in Melbourne, only hours after crime boss Macchour Chaouk was shot dead at his house.