31 Days of Horror – October 2nd – “Wolf Creek”

In “Wolf Creek“, you’ve literally gotta fight for your right to party. The audience is thrust into the frat party underbelly of the Australian outback. We meet a group of backpacking college kids that simply want to exercise their right to peacefully binge drink and fraternize, maybe wake up on a beach surrounded by empty booze bottles. Somehow, their dream of drunken bliss slides into a torture porn nightmare at the hands of a maniac bushman. Hey! Don’t chop my fingers off and intentionally sever my spinal cord, bro!

Sound familiar? “Wolf Creek” is basically Hostel: Down Under, right down to the Crocodile Dundee enormous knife joke. Like Eli Roth’s movie, the creative energy here mostly gets spent on slasher-y torture slice-n-pokes and/or stalk-chase-kill scenes. (Hence the “torture porn” nickname.) Graphic? You betcha. Bloody? Absolutely. Heartwarming? Not that much, actually.

British tourists Liz and Kristy meet Aussie Ben and decide to travel with him for the rest of their vacation. They head to Wolf Creek, the site of a huge crater where a meteor hit, and hike about it’s crater-y-ness in the rain. When they head back to their car, it won’t start. Naturally. A mysterious stranger with a cowboy hat happens upon them after dark, though, and offers a helping hand. They accept. Later he offers a murdering hand. They mostly accept that, too. The movie is very loosely based on true events (there really was an Australian serial killer that tortured and killed backpackers.)

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 104 minutes

Directed by: Greg Mclean

Written by: Greg Mclean

Starring: John Jarratt, Cassandra Magrath, Kestie Morassi

Theatrical Release: 12/25/05

DVD Release: 04/11/06

Production Budget: $1.4 million

Domestic Gross: $16 million

Metacritic Score: 54/100

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 53%

“Wolf Creek” was made in Australia on a shoe string budget ($1.4 million in Aussie dollars, which is even less in Ameros.) Considering that, it’s actually fairly impressive as a production. It’s visually interesting and engaging, both in terms of the colorful Australian landscape shots and the special effects during the mutilation and maim scenes. There are also some effective manipulations of the conventions of the horror genre that provided some surprises as well. Beyond that, though, the plot and characters are very forgettable. Like most slashers, it’s style uber alles, with the story left to drown in the oceans of fake blood.

The movie came out in 2005 and was very successful financially. It’s impossible to not mention the critical response as well, at least in passing. While it got rave reviews among horror fanatics (Fangoria called it the scariest movie of the year), it got some surprisingly harsh ones from some mainstream reviewers. Roger Ebert (tvcasualties’ idol critic, more or less) gave it a rare 0 stars and said he wished he’d walked out of the theater and just kept on walking. Other elite reviewers responded similarly. I actually think such a strong response to a horror movie, even if it’s overtly negative, might mean that the filmmaker was onto something – something disturbing enough to rattle people that have watched thousands of movies and are pretty desensitized to what can happen on the screen. That said, outside of a little twist along the way that genuinely surprised me, I thought it was just OK.