Cane Toads: The Conquest

Mark Lewis follows up his irreverent 1988 nature doc ‘Cane Toads: An Unnatural History’ with an equally amusing, 3D enhanced visit to to Queensland to introduce us to the perpetrators of one of Australia’s worst ecological disasters in crisp, three-dimensional detail and record their inexorable advance across the country. It all started to go wrong in 1932, when, in an effort to eradicate the sugarcane-destroying greyback beetle, one Cyril Pemberton arrived with two suitcases of toxic cane toads from Puerto Rico. The toads failed miserably: instead of eating the beetles, they simply multiplied, screwing up the ecosystem. Lewis’s documentary wallows in the absurdity of this man-made catastrophe by way of cheeky footage and interviews to make you chuckle. A shame, then, that its drift becomes a little too repetitive to pull you in completely.