SusannahWolf Creek
February 24th 2007 04:25
WOLF CREEK
Dir: Greg McLean
Starring: John Jarratt; Cassandra Mcgrath; Kestie Morassi; Nathan Phillips
Sometimes movies make you mad. Not because the narrative itself arouses feelings of anger, but because you can see where a film has the potential to be really good, but went so horribly wrong. Wolf Creek is one such film. A warning, there will be rampant plot spoilers in this review, so cease reading now if you don’t want to know all the surprises.
The “true events” that the film is loosely based on are (mainly) the disappearance and alleged murder of British tourist Peter Falconio, and attempted abduction of his girlfriend Joanne Lees, in the Australian outback in 2001. The couple were driving along a desert highway when they were waved at by a man in another car, who indicated for them to pull over because of an alleged problem with their exhaust. Falconio got out of their van to check out the problem, and was apparently shot by the attacker. Joanne Lees was then tied up by the assailant and forced into his vehicle. She escaped while the killer disposed of Falconio’s body, which has never been found. Lees hid all night in the dark while the killer searched for her with his dog and a torch. Bradley John Murdoch was later convicted of the murder and attempted abduction. The Snowtown murders in the South of Australia, which were the work of several perpetrators who brutally tortured their victims, as well as the Backpackers murders, where 5 tourists and 2 Australians were murdered by one serial killer, Ivan Milat, can also be seen as influences.
This all lends Wolf Creek an air of gritty this-could-have-really-happen ed believability. The story goes like this: three photogenic twenty-somethings (two British chicks and an up-for-it surfer type) head off into the desert to go take a look at a great big meteor crater. The trio return to find that their vehicle’s engine is dead. So they sit in said car and wait. It gets dark. A couple of strange alien lights approach them through the darkness. The lights turn out to be the headlights of a big-ass off-road vehicle driven by an Aussie bloke so irritatingly cheery and blokish you expect a neon sign screaming ‘stereotype’ to blink on and off at the bottom of the screen (that’s John Jarratt incidentally).Sure he’ll fix they’re car for them. Even do it for free. All they have to do it let him tow them for hours and hours through the endless outback night to his creepy-as-all-hell abandoned car yard. Do characters in horror movies ever actually watch horror movies? He doesn’t like their Mick Dundee references (they use the “That’s not a knife…” line, like, three times in this film and actually manage to get away with it - I wonder if Hogan gets royalties) and drugs them all. The brunette wakes up locked inside a grimy shed while the screams of her girlfriend echo throughout the empty car-yard beyond.
And so the nightmare begins…
They call this stuff Gorenography or Horror-porn nowadays but back when I was a zygote they made similar films and I recall them being called Survival Horror. They were ugly and brutal and shot on grimy low-fidelity film-stock. None of the actors were professional and most of the time they were out baking in the sun on location until their brains fried and their tempers got really short. Those flicks were all about how messed up human nature could be and how hidden reserves of brutality and cunning lay at the heart of every middle-class family man or teenaged girl. The threat was always some deviant psycho with a fondness for unorthodox weaponry (guns weren’t really allowed as the blood spatter would be less satisfying). The most successful of these films conformed to very specific rules. Tobe Hooper used them, so did Wes Craven. Nowadays it’s Eli Roth and Alexandre Aja who bravely continue the tradition.
The Rules are these: if you have three protagonists, two will die. The first will die suddenly and brutally (possibly even off-screen). Their death will signify to the other two (and the audience) just how real the threat is. The film will always dwell more closely on the one protagonist who is going to live through this nightmare. It will almost certainly be a woman. The second victim will die a much slower and more horrible death. It will be prolonged and ugly and uncomfortable to watch, but it won’t actually last that long, cinematically speaking. The third protagonist will suffer immensely at the hands of the antagonist psycho-type. Through a combination of cunning and balls-out bravery they will manage to escape the assailant, but in the process something inside of them will change and they will no longer be able to just flee. They’ll want revenge. In the third act they will overpower and kill the antagonist in an orgy of violence that will have the audience on their feet cheering, that is, until the audience realises how badly they wanted to see that human being (psycho or not) suffer and what that says about them as human beings. You get terror, tension, catharsis and a final bite at the very end. Surely that’s what this kind of horror is all about. Not in Wolf Creek it’s not. Because, after painstakingly creating this awful sense of realism, the film-makers embark on an epic campaign of self-sabotage.
Wolf Creek leaves you following one character for fifteen to twenty minutes (and following this one character exclusively) until it cruelly and casually dispatches them. Sick of the killer in the back-seat cliché? Always thought it seemed a bit implausible? Well, how’s this for a set-up? Our protagonist has a ring of car-keys. She is in a giant hangar containing no fewer than ten cars. She is alone. No-one has entered the hangar after her. She randomly chooses a car. After several attempts she finds that one of the keys starts the engine of said car. She sighs with relief and gets ready to drive to rescue her injured girlfriend. From the backseat comes an evil chuckle. What are the odds? I mean, seriously, what are the odds? Ten to one (at least) she’d have been out of that hangar and away while Jarrett sat in some other car’s backseat and giggled to himself. In one scene he has gone from being a very human, very fallible (and hence believable) killer to some tired old cartoon monster. All this just kind of feels like the script-writer more-or-less gave up after realising he didn’t really know how to end the thing.
Joanne Lees hid in a bit of scrub just a short distance from the highway until her assailant gave up looking for her and drove away. That’s how dark and vast and impossible the Australian outback is, Jarratt’s killer would’ve had to rig his victims with tracking devices to find them the way he does…and does…and does.
Only in the final five minutes does the film return to the up-for-it Aussie dude (no longer all that up-for-it now that he’s been crucified next to a caged dog) He’d been missing from the movie for over half an hour and I’d actually forgotten about him. He un-crucifies himself and walks out of the car-yard. The End. The killer doesn’t show up for a final scare. A blurb runs over the screen saying how our “hero” made it to a nearby town but the bodies of the women were never found and everyone kind of figured he killed them himself. The film ends with a mythical shot of Jarratt framed against a dying sunset, presumably waiting for his next victim. So, no climax and no catharsis. At times it feels more like a snuff movie where you are just watching women get brutalised for an hour. Wolf Creek is as clichéd, pointless and weary as it gets.
Sure, it is not all bad. The cinematography is very polished and there are some really lovely panning shots and foreboding close-ups of cattle skulls. The dialogue and acting is convincingly naturalistic and the cast are easy on the eye. The film also manages some tense and disturbing moments. But is it the renaissance of Australian cinema? No, watch The Proposition instead…no really, watch it, it’s a fine film – and yeah, the outback looks even better shot through Hillcoat’s lens.
Dir: Greg McLean
Starring: John Jarratt; Cassandra Mcgrath; Kestie Morassi; Nathan Phillips
Sometimes movies make you mad. Not because the narrative itself arouses feelings of anger, but because you can see where a film has the potential to be really good, but went so horribly wrong. Wolf Creek is one such film. A warning, there will be rampant plot spoilers in this review, so cease reading now if you don’t want to know all the surprises.
The “true events” that the film is loosely based on are (mainly) the disappearance and alleged murder of British tourist Peter Falconio, and attempted abduction of his girlfriend Joanne Lees, in the Australian outback in 2001. The couple were driving along a desert highway when they were waved at by a man in another car, who indicated for them to pull over because of an alleged problem with their exhaust. Falconio got out of their van to check out the problem, and was apparently shot by the attacker. Joanne Lees was then tied up by the assailant and forced into his vehicle. She escaped while the killer disposed of Falconio’s body, which has never been found. Lees hid all night in the dark while the killer searched for her with his dog and a torch. Bradley John Murdoch was later convicted of the murder and attempted abduction. The Snowtown murders in the South of Australia, which were the work of several perpetrators who brutally tortured their victims, as well as the Backpackers murders, where 5 tourists and 2 Australians were murdered by one serial killer, Ivan Milat, can also be seen as influences.
This all lends Wolf Creek an air of gritty this-could-have-really-happen ed believability. The story goes like this: three photogenic twenty-somethings (two British chicks and an up-for-it surfer type) head off into the desert to go take a look at a great big meteor crater. The trio return to find that their vehicle’s engine is dead. So they sit in said car and wait. It gets dark. A couple of strange alien lights approach them through the darkness. The lights turn out to be the headlights of a big-ass off-road vehicle driven by an Aussie bloke so irritatingly cheery and blokish you expect a neon sign screaming ‘stereotype’ to blink on and off at the bottom of the screen (that’s John Jarratt incidentally).Sure he’ll fix they’re car for them. Even do it for free. All they have to do it let him tow them for hours and hours through the endless outback night to his creepy-as-all-hell abandoned car yard. Do characters in horror movies ever actually watch horror movies? He doesn’t like their Mick Dundee references (they use the “That’s not a knife…” line, like, three times in this film and actually manage to get away with it - I wonder if Hogan gets royalties) and drugs them all. The brunette wakes up locked inside a grimy shed while the screams of her girlfriend echo throughout the empty car-yard beyond.
They call this stuff Gorenography or Horror-porn nowadays but back when I was a zygote they made similar films and I recall them being called Survival Horror. They were ugly and brutal and shot on grimy low-fidelity film-stock. None of the actors were professional and most of the time they were out baking in the sun on location until their brains fried and their tempers got really short. Those flicks were all about how messed up human nature could be and how hidden reserves of brutality and cunning lay at the heart of every middle-class family man or teenaged girl. The threat was always some deviant psycho with a fondness for unorthodox weaponry (guns weren’t really allowed as the blood spatter would be less satisfying). The most successful of these films conformed to very specific rules. Tobe Hooper used them, so did Wes Craven. Nowadays it’s Eli Roth and Alexandre Aja who bravely continue the tradition.
The Rules are these: if you have three protagonists, two will die. The first will die suddenly and brutally (possibly even off-screen). Their death will signify to the other two (and the audience) just how real the threat is. The film will always dwell more closely on the one protagonist who is going to live through this nightmare. It will almost certainly be a woman. The second victim will die a much slower and more horrible death. It will be prolonged and ugly and uncomfortable to watch, but it won’t actually last that long, cinematically speaking. The third protagonist will suffer immensely at the hands of the antagonist psycho-type. Through a combination of cunning and balls-out bravery they will manage to escape the assailant, but in the process something inside of them will change and they will no longer be able to just flee. They’ll want revenge. In the third act they will overpower and kill the antagonist in an orgy of violence that will have the audience on their feet cheering, that is, until the audience realises how badly they wanted to see that human being (psycho or not) suffer and what that says about them as human beings. You get terror, tension, catharsis and a final bite at the very end. Surely that’s what this kind of horror is all about. Not in Wolf Creek it’s not. Because, after painstakingly creating this awful sense of realism, the film-makers embark on an epic campaign of self-sabotage.
Wolf Creek leaves you following one character for fifteen to twenty minutes (and following this one character exclusively) until it cruelly and casually dispatches them. Sick of the killer in the back-seat cliché? Always thought it seemed a bit implausible? Well, how’s this for a set-up? Our protagonist has a ring of car-keys. She is in a giant hangar containing no fewer than ten cars. She is alone. No-one has entered the hangar after her. She randomly chooses a car. After several attempts she finds that one of the keys starts the engine of said car. She sighs with relief and gets ready to drive to rescue her injured girlfriend. From the backseat comes an evil chuckle. What are the odds? I mean, seriously, what are the odds? Ten to one (at least) she’d have been out of that hangar and away while Jarrett sat in some other car’s backseat and giggled to himself. In one scene he has gone from being a very human, very fallible (and hence believable) killer to some tired old cartoon monster. All this just kind of feels like the script-writer more-or-less gave up after realising he didn’t really know how to end the thing.
Joanne Lees hid in a bit of scrub just a short distance from the highway until her assailant gave up looking for her and drove away. That’s how dark and vast and impossible the Australian outback is, Jarratt’s killer would’ve had to rig his victims with tracking devices to find them the way he does…and does…and does.
Only in the final five minutes does the film return to the up-for-it Aussie dude (no longer all that up-for-it now that he’s been crucified next to a caged dog) He’d been missing from the movie for over half an hour and I’d actually forgotten about him. He un-crucifies himself and walks out of the car-yard. The End. The killer doesn’t show up for a final scare. A blurb runs over the screen saying how our “hero” made it to a nearby town but the bodies of the women were never found and everyone kind of figured he killed them himself. The film ends with a mythical shot of Jarratt framed against a dying sunset, presumably waiting for his next victim. So, no climax and no catharsis. At times it feels more like a snuff movie where you are just watching women get brutalised for an hour. Wolf Creek is as clichéd, pointless and weary as it gets.
Sure, it is not all bad. The cinematography is very polished and there are some really lovely panning shots and foreboding close-ups of cattle skulls. The dialogue and acting is convincingly naturalistic and the cast are easy on the eye. The film also manages some tense and disturbing moments. But is it the renaissance of Australian cinema? No, watch The Proposition instead…no really, watch it, it’s a fine film – and yeah, the outback looks even better shot through Hillcoat’s lens.
| 76 |
| Vote |
subscribe to this blog
