Directed by Mark Lewis • 1988 • Australia
Starring Tip Byrne, Glen Ingram, H. W. Kerr

Mark Lewis takes the nature documentary into new realms of the humorous, surreal, and downright bizarre with this stranger-than-fiction tale of the ultimate environmental self-own. The cane toad—Bufo marinus, a species native to Central America—was imported by the sack-load to Australia in 1935 in an attempt to rid the country of the greyback beetle, which was rapidly destroying the sugarcane crop. The toads adapted beautifully to their new surroundings. Problem was, the beetle could fly and they couldn’t. What the cane toad is unusually proficient at, however, is making more cane toads—thousands upon thousands more. CANE TOADS: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY tells the wild story of this amphibious assault—warts and all.