| UNFAIR DINKUM : Greg McLean's 'Wolf Creek' [6/10] |
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| Monday, 26 September 2005 | |
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w a r n i n g : c o n t a i n s S P O I L E R S Trailing clouds of horror hype since making a big splash at January's Sundance Film Festival, Aussie shocker Wolf Creek doesn't quite live up to the expectations raised by some ecstatic reviews. It does, however, manage to serve up more than enough enough tension, surprise and grisly nastiness (protracted beyond the point of sadism at times) to make for an old-fashioned white-knuckle night out at the pictures. And as you walk home you'll have the fun of debating with your friends how much or little sense the picture actually makes when you stop to think about it the final revelations. What's undeniable is that, despite Will Gibson's cinematography capturing the wilds of the country in all its aching beauty, debutant writer/director McLean - for all his great promise - is unlikely to win any honours from the Australian Tourist Board any time soon. On this evidence the Outback is, like space, a place where nobody can hear you scream... This is a lesson which a trio of twentysomething holidaymakers learn in the hardest way possible. They are English best-pals Kristy and Liz (Kestie Morassi and Cassandra Magrath, both doing a good job of hiding their antipodean accents) who are joined by crop-haired Sydney surf-dude Ben (stocky Nathan Phillips, unrecognisable as the kid from Australian Rules) for a trip to a huge meteor crater at a remote spot known as Wolf Creek. There's a solar eclipse imminent, and the trio spook each other out with eerie tales - only for their watches and their car-battery to all fail at the exact same moment. Many miles from the nearest settlement - in a land where mobile-phone signals are still some decades away - it looks like the travellers are going to be stranded overnight. Until, that is, a jolly old Outbacker named Mick (John Jarratt) turns up with his truck, offering to lend a hand. If Kristy, Liz and Ben had seen many rural-horror pictures, they might think twice of taking the genial Mick at face value - but then, of course, there wouldn't be a Wolf Creek at all. McLean has clearly watched and digested plenty of late-night chillers: at various points this, his debut feature, strongly recalls forebears both Australian - Peter Weir's epochal Picnic at Hanging Rock (1974; spookiness at remote Australian natural feature) and the more lurid Outback thrills of Richard Franklin's Road Games (1981) and Russel Mulcahy's Razorback (1984), both penned by Everett de Roche - and American - most obviously Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (here it's an eclipse instead of sunspots/solar-flares); Victor Salva's Jeepers Creepers (truck-driving killer remorselessly hunts down his prey). As it goes on, however, audiences familiar with recent big-screen horrors may be forcibly - and, perhaps, uncomfortably, reminded of French gore-fest Haut Tension (aka Switchblade Romance) and the dogme-style zero-budgeter Open Water. In Haut Tension we witness an implacable old farmer type carving a trail of blood in pursuit of two hapless young travelling women - until a cheaty final-reel twist which indicates that we should never have believed what our eyes were telling us. And in Open Water a supposedly "true story" is revealed as much more a matter of speculation than documentary fact. Wolf Creek combines Haut Tension's "cheatiness" with Open Water's "speculation" - the difference being that McLean's grasp of film-making technique is such that you don't really mind being diddled by his smart-alec script. And it does score on the psychological and even perhaps the political fronts: there's a recurring, intriguing subtext in which short-arsed, tattooed muscle-mary Ben's masculinity (Sydney is dismissed as the "poofter capital" of the country) - not to mention his enlightened 'modern maleness' - are constantly under challenge and/or threat, even though he's absent from the screen for much of the running-time. This dovetails neatly with the idea that Mick isn't just a knife-wielding psycho - he's like a roo-hunting ghost of Australia past, into whose savage domain these 21st-century townies have inadvertently and unwisely stumbled. And this isn't just yet another "don't leave the cities" anti-yokel scare-story for urban teens: by making the two girls British, McLean enables the uber-Ocker Mick to obtain a grotesque kind of revenge on the hated former colonial master. And there's us thinking the Ashes were a tooth-and-nail, blood-and-guts, to-the-death affair... Neil Young 26th September, 2005 WOLF CREEK : [6/10] : Australia 2005 : Greg McLEAN : 99 mins seen at Cineworld cinema, Sunderland city centre (UK), 22nd September 2005 - public show - originally rated 7/10, but downgraded on reflection, 10th Oct 2005 |
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