"Wolf Creek" is certainly not a film for the faint-hearted, and let me preface this by saying that I'm hardly faint-hearted. However, it's also a terrible film and one which really doesn't deserve the reputation it's achieved.
The plot, such as it is, has a trio of young travellers driving across the Top End of Australia and running into Mick (John Jarratt) who offers to fix their car. Unfortunately, it turns out that Mick is a sadistic nutcase who enjoys torturing and killing people - with all parallels to Ivan Milat being entirely non-coincidental. So the rest of the film features various attempts to escape from the madman as he hunts them down.
Admittedly, this is a straight-out genre flick, but that hardly exempts it from the requirement that it have vaguely three-dimensional characters and a halfway decent script. "Wolf Creek" has neither. The three travellers are humanised a little bit in the first scenes, but not really enough to actually make the viewer care about them when they are captured. As for Mick...well...he's "just evil", by the looks. I might be in the minority, but I prefer my sadistic killers to have a backstory. The script, too, has some heavy-handedness about it. Mick reveals at one point that he's taken parts out of the threesome's car, which makes sense. What doesn't make sense is the fact that he hasn't done the same to the cars of his previous victims - as one of the girls discovers when she miraculously starts up one of these cars. Of course, it's just her luck that it's the same car that Mick's been hiding in - what a coincidence.
A further problem is the way the filming was done. I know it's trendy to use hand-held cameras, but watching an entire film on one is quite an ordeal. This is particularly true when the tension rises and the camera starts jiggling up and down and side-to-side. Clearly, the cameraman was getting into the moment, but it is disconcerting at best and downright infuriating at worst to have this happening all the time. Similarly, much of the film takes place at night - so many of the scenes consist of barely-visible glimpses of characters and locations. At least this distracts from the home video-style filming, but it makes the action more confusing.
Ultimately, however, this film is all about gratuitous blood and guts and pulls very few punches in showing them. People are shot, hit with guns, beaten up, nailed to things, shot again and hacked up with knives and the jiggly handycam shows every single moment of it. Viewers with weak stomachs will probably feel ill - if they haven't already got motion sickness.
So, Australia has produced a genre film. Are we meant to be happy about this? Frankly, it just isn't worth the fanfare to see four people acting badly (Jarratt's good in his part, but even he seems to be going through the motions in places) and being cut to pieces. This really is a step backwards in Australian film, since all involved seem to have decided that just because the country hasn't done this sort of thing yet, they have to. Perhaps they do, but there are significantly better ways of doing it than this garbage.
Stay away from this one. Believe me, there'll be more than enough chance to see it - and probably the inevitable straight-to-DVD sequels - when it's available in shops.
The plot, such as it is, has a trio of young travellers driving across the Top End of Australia and running into Mick (John Jarratt) who offers to fix their car. Unfortunately, it turns out that Mick is a sadistic nutcase who enjoys torturing and killing people - with all parallels to Ivan Milat being entirely non-coincidental. So the rest of the film features various attempts to escape from the madman as he hunts them down.
Admittedly, this is a straight-out genre flick, but that hardly exempts it from the requirement that it have vaguely three-dimensional characters and a halfway decent script. "Wolf Creek" has neither. The three travellers are humanised a little bit in the first scenes, but not really enough to actually make the viewer care about them when they are captured. As for Mick...well...he's "just evil", by the looks. I might be in the minority, but I prefer my sadistic killers to have a backstory. The script, too, has some heavy-handedness about it. Mick reveals at one point that he's taken parts out of the threesome's car, which makes sense. What doesn't make sense is the fact that he hasn't done the same to the cars of his previous victims - as one of the girls discovers when she miraculously starts up one of these cars. Of course, it's just her luck that it's the same car that Mick's been hiding in - what a coincidence.
A further problem is the way the filming was done. I know it's trendy to use hand-held cameras, but watching an entire film on one is quite an ordeal. This is particularly true when the tension rises and the camera starts jiggling up and down and side-to-side. Clearly, the cameraman was getting into the moment, but it is disconcerting at best and downright infuriating at worst to have this happening all the time. Similarly, much of the film takes place at night - so many of the scenes consist of barely-visible glimpses of characters and locations. At least this distracts from the home video-style filming, but it makes the action more confusing.
Ultimately, however, this film is all about gratuitous blood and guts and pulls very few punches in showing them. People are shot, hit with guns, beaten up, nailed to things, shot again and hacked up with knives and the jiggly handycam shows every single moment of it. Viewers with weak stomachs will probably feel ill - if they haven't already got motion sickness.
So, Australia has produced a genre film. Are we meant to be happy about this? Frankly, it just isn't worth the fanfare to see four people acting badly (Jarratt's good in his part, but even he seems to be going through the motions in places) and being cut to pieces. This really is a step backwards in Australian film, since all involved seem to have decided that just because the country hasn't done this sort of thing yet, they have to. Perhaps they do, but there are significantly better ways of doing it than this garbage.
Stay away from this one. Believe me, there'll be more than enough chance to see it - and probably the inevitable straight-to-DVD sequels - when it's available in shops.