Wolf Creek (2005)

A review, and for that matter a viewing, of Wolf Creek was for me long overdue. I was 13 when it came out - that special age where you deliberately seek thrills way beyond your maturity level - and everyone was talking about it, and how brutal it was. Of course, 13 year olds spread not an ounce of detail in terms of the movie's plot, only about its levels of violence. Last night, I got to its IMDb page for reasons I don't recall, and inevitably turned to Ebert for his opinion, and it seemed to back up, in greater detail of course, what my teenage classmates had claimed some nine years ago.

As is typical with this kind of hype, I had conjured my own vivid and frankly stupid versions of the movie's infamous scenes, which turned out to be far worse than anything contained on that shiny disc. Ebert said that "When the killer severs the spine of one of his victims and calls her "a head on a stick," I wanted to walk out of the theater and keep on walking." With this, I imagined some poor girl's lonesome head attached to nothing but a spine, with the rest of the body somehow removed. A proper head on a stick. What I was confronted by was a gritty stab to the back and some haunting allusions to Nam. Disgusting, cruel and disturbing, certainly, but in the Creativity Race, it's definitely Mind 1- Movie 0.

Opening with the now wrung-out-and-hung-out 'Based on true events' title card, we are told that 30,000 Australians are reported missing each year. 90% are found within a month. Some are never seen again... This loose statement is about the extent of movie's link to actual events. The supposed inspiration was the tragic story of British backpacker Peter Falconio, who was attacked by a driver in the Australian outback as his girlfriend eventually escaped. She, inside the car, heard a gunshot from outside, then was blindfolded and bound, and never saw her boyfriend again. He is presumed dead. This is nothing like Wolf Creek, but even if it were, is it very ethical to make a movie based on the real pain of a real victim, in order to entertain? And when I ask this, I refer mainly to the horror subgenres, which aim to disgust and sicken its audience, without addressing any deeper issues within its material.

Wolf Creek makes no attempt to address deeper issues within its material. If I'm honest, its surprisingly sudden wind-down and wrap-up gave off a totally unsettling vibe, which - as much as I hate to go there - seemed a little...misogynist. The movie starts off with British tourists Liz (Cassandra Magrath) and Kristy (Kestie Morassi) and their Aussie mate Ben (Nathan Phillips), dedicates the majority of screen time to the ordeals and eventual deaths of the girls, and ends with Ben having been unconscious throughout, pulling himself down from the nails on the wall, and escaping, where he is rescued by two Swedish tourists. After both girls had been taken out, and the film suddenly got back to Ben again, I literally said, "Oh yeah, that guy!" It had been so long, I'd almost forgotten about him. His escape seemed like an afterthought. 

But anyhow, the start of the film is quite strong. Cinematography and locations are beautiful from the start, taking advantage of those vast dusty Australian sunsets and their every colour of the spectrum. The trio are doing some cross country trip and naturally cannot avoid pulling into a diner/gas station populated by the outback's most beardy, baccy-chewin', denim- and leather-clad weirdos, who promptly set about the young outsiders and soon scare them back out of the doors on typically petty and aggressive terms. At this point, I found myself thinking, "If these hicks are going to be the aggressors, and this tiny moment in their day is enough to prompt the massacre, then they really need to get a life!" Thankfully, these weren't the aggressors, they were just false alarms who are never again heard from. I guess they did have lives after all.

En route the buddies decide to stop in at a massive meteorite crater walking trail at Wolf Creek, and there are some spectacular aerial shots of the real Wolfe Creek in Australia. When they return to their car, it won't start and it starts raining, so they sit tight and wait for the morning. Except in the night, headlights ominously approach, and reveal themselves as that of Mick (John Jarrett), who is like Crocodile Dundee without a sense of humour. In fact it happens that Crocodile Dundee is exactly where his sense of humour lacks. Anyway, out here in the middle of the night, he offers a tow back to his to fix the automobile, and the girls are hesitant, but of course Ben, who in horror terms is dubbed 'Male Idiot', is quite open to the idea, even when they are towed off the road and further out into nowhere.

Back at Mick's (wasn't Dundee's name Mick too? I guess every Aussie man is named Mick, just like every French man is François and every Mexican man is Juan) the friends sit around his campfire and drink his 'rainwater,' while he tells them stories of his life. Then they make the stupid and frankly rude decision to mock him with the Dundee "this is a knife" line (which of course is later sarcastically repeated in appropriate context). Mick is visibly displeased, and they soon fall unconscious, the water having been spiked. From this, if not also from his aimless driving up what was a dead end at the crater, it is made known that Mick has little logical motivation for his subsequent abuse. When one of the girls later comes across camera footage of other families having their exact same experiences at the hands of Mick, it is made certain that this kind of thing is just a hobby of his, like growing sideburns or collecting flannel shirts.

Now these girls (remember, Ben is out of the picture for the majority of the action) display an overwhelming level of stupidity in the face of threat. Sure, they wouldn't be thinking straight through the trauma, but in the decisions they make and seem to put some thought into, are real misuses of the energy. For instance, after succeeding in overpowering Mick briefly, he is hit twice over the head, and the girls stagger off, leaving his probably-not-dead body next to a loaded shotgun, which they strategically decide against taking with them. Later, having succeeded in jacking a perfectly good car, they decide to roll the thing off a cliff to convince the not-dead Mick that they are dead. However, he was far behind them, and they should have used the car to get away. No two ways about it. They just make one idiotic move after another, so often that it becomes one of those Scream at the Set movies.

What is there to really say from here? The girls die, the guy lives because he slept through the whole fucking ordeal. And then...no traces of the girls were found, no one was ever taken down for the crimes, the killer is still at large, and nothing has changed. What's the point in there being a survivor if the killer is still at large? Oh yeah, Wolf Creek 2, that's the point. Except I haven't yet seen that, but a quick Wiki search reveals that Jarrett reprises his role, so there we have it. Acting is all right, nothing particularly special. The victims' stupidity really detracts any need for good acting. Jarrett is very good for how his role is written, which is not very intimidatingly. His oncoming headlights are really more menacing than his presence.

Wolf Creek is tense in places, predictable in more, and downright stupid in most. It's not particularly scary, and it won't be one that particularly stands out in my memory.