*Contains spoilers*
I'm not a big fan of slasher flicks, but the family wanted to watch this one and so I went along with it for the company.
Wolf Creek was, to me, both a surprising turnaround of the stale old genre norms, yet also a depressing trudge right through all the things that I don't enjoy about "slasher" movies.
Filmed by an Indie group on a low budget, it was nice for once to see that the "Shakycam" effect is foregone for more conventional filming.
The plot concerns the ill-fated adventure of three young people (2 girls and a guy) travelling through the Australian outback.
The acting from everyone involved in the film is quite impressive, though the film gets off to a slow start and I found myself getting restless during the intro 30 minutes or so, where the obligatory scenes of young people having "crazy" parties were thrown in. Since that sort of thing seems to be in every slasher flick ever, I was straight to thinking "Ah, this movie is going to be a pile of turd, no surprises there."
However, things took a turn for the better upon the group's first arrival at an isolated petrol station. The male of the group, Ben, is intimidated by some burly rough-looking men in a conversation that's genuinely tense. Eventually he is bailed out by the "weird over-friendly local", who actually turns out to be the most normal person there - he tells the leader of the men to stop "acting like a dickhead".
Impressed by the atmosphere in the scene, I equally enjoyed it when the villain of the film turned up. Oozing a strange charm and easy sense of humour at first, John Jarratt is great as the terrifying Mick Taylor.
After offering to help out the group with their broken down car, he takes them back to his place of residence (an old mining outpost) and sits around a campfire with the trio.
Mick is a drifting hunter in the outback, moving from place to place. Despite being tough and rough, he seems warm and welcoming to the party. After some lengthy scenes in which we get a glimpse of his superfically friendly personality, he slowly shows his true colours.
Taking offence at one of Ben's "Crocodile Dundee" jokes, he stares at him for an excessive length of time, mouth open slightly, and we start to realise that he's clearly not as friendly as he seems.
It's not long before he drugs them and has them tied up, at his mercy.
And this is where the film took a huge nosedive for me, sadly. The rest of the film is pretty much torture-porn of the nastiest kind.
It's one thing to create a tense and disturbing atmosphere, but the film goes further. It creates that atmosphere, but it seems to stop being entertainment in the process. The effect is more akin to watching a horrific car crash in slow motion.
Take, for example, the scene where Mick apparently rapes a member of the trio. He then takes great delight in taunting the girl, telling her in the most unpleasant ways how he will horribly kill her and so on.
This is not an uncommon sort of thing in horror films...and I expect the most twisted killers out there probably do act like that in reality. But even so, Wolf Creek focuses on this particular scene for what feels like about 15 minutes.
And I did not enjoy that time a bit - it was less like an atmosphere was being manipulated by the director, and more like a prolonged and unpleasantly "indulgent" trip into something that I have no desire to experience. "Exploitation film" is a phrase which comes to mind.
This continues throughout the film, with the two women of the group being subjected to absolutely horrendous things that I won't bother with here. And the film also sacrifices itself to an irritating horror cliche: when given the completely obvious chance of easily killing the main antagonist, the heroines don't take it.
By far the most excessive scene has to be the "head on a stick" scene. Mick essentially ends the life of a main character by severing their spine with a knife, rendering them paralysed from the neck down and completely open to any further torture he'd like to inflict.
When I saw that scene, I just thought "What the fuck? What's the point of this movie, other than "enjoying" watching some poor souls get horribly sliced up in ways I don't even want to imagine?"
The male lead does disappointingly little once the horror begins - instead it feels like watching 1.5 hours of women in the most unpleasant distress imaginable.
John Jarratt's character felt truly promising at the outset, when he is at his most disarmingly "nice", and I had high hopes for the film. He's undoubtedly a very talented actor to make such a blunt and horrible role something you can study with interest.
However, he was let down completely with the material. I don't mind gore in horror films, I don't even mind psychological horror (in fact I enjoy it).
What I don't enjoy watching is an entire feature length which essentially features people put in an inescapable, hopeless situation, then delights in showing their brutal violation with the worst kind of sadistic, directorial glee that revels in every pitiful moment of suffering on screen.
I'll give it two stars purely for Jarratt's acting and the scenes before the "horror" begins, because those elements were enjoyable.
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