Horror Off-Season: Wolf Creek

I originally wasn't going to write up Wolf Creek because it's a few years older than what I normally hit during the off season.  But the more I think about my own reaction to the movie the more I feel I owe it to fairness to write it up here.

Released in 2009, Wolf Creek is an Australian horror film written and directed by Greg McLean and stars John Jarratt as Mick Taylor.  McLean is a member of a loose and unofficial group of filmmakers called the "Splat Pack" along with Eli Roth, Alexandre Aja, and Darren Lynn Bousman who are all known for making realistic and brutally violent thrillers.  Sort of like an international version of the New French Extremism.  Though I really think Bousman's true calling is deranged punk musicals.

Part of the reason I wasn't going to put this up initially was my known distaste for these types of movies.  I've hated every one of them I've seen:  Asylum Blackout, Martyrs, The Loved Ones, etc... I'm not a huge fan of anything like Hostel and that ilk, but I found that at least inoffensive.  And Wolf Creek is one of those exact types of horrible, bloody, depraved, torture filled jaunts I'm wont to rage against.  However, Wolf Creek is actually a fairly decent movie and that is just damned interesting.  Beware, there be spoilers here.

The film itself is about three young adults that are backpacking around Australia.  While the characters fall into asshole horror film character stereotype a little bit during the opening but they never go full jackass.  When they're offensive it's usually because they just don't think or know better.  Otherwise they try to be nice and welcoming kids instead of confrontational jerks.  After trekking around with them for a bit and getting some exposition on who likes who, they decide to go visit a meteor impact crater, the eponymous Wolf Creek Crater.  This is a real thing, google it...it's pretty huge.  However, their car breaks down and they're forced to spend the night when they run into helpful (if strange) outback denizen Mick Taylor who tows them back to his camp where he drugs them with plans to torture and kill them, one-by-one.  However, one of the girls manages to escape, then springing the other they lead Mick on a merry chase.  The guy of the group is pretty much a non-entity for almost the entire 3rd act and only reappears briefly in the final reel to wrap up the story.

What I think this movie has that so many other "torture porn" entries seem to lack is a sense of interest and pacing.  Mick Taylor is mustache-twirlingly evil and he loves it that way.  He seems to be aware on some level of how insane and depraved he is and just hams it up.  All too often these movies tend to feel like they need to make their serial torturer super serious and dark because if you're that evil you can't have fun, or give them some sort of sad past backstory so that they're delusional and think that what they're doing is OK or that they don't have a choice.  This sort of joyous sadism really elevates Mick as a horror killer to a level similar to Freddy, in early installments of the series anyway.

Another point was pacing.  Less enjoyable movies will continually bombard you with horrific images, feeding you endless carnage so that you can't stop to breath and let anything have psychological weight.  Wolf Creek is pretty brisk, but it varies things up tonally.  Rather than an assembly line of wounds inflicted on characters you don't care about, Wolf Creek gives us disturbing torture, Mick being gleeful, the characters getting the upper hand, hiding tensely, almost getting away, thinking they're safe, realizing they're not, etc.  What this does is prevent audience burn out from too much of a single pitch and also let moments of torture marinate into fear and despair, which is how torture should work in a movie.

So take that for what it is.  I'm still not a fan of these absurdly gory movies and I'll take my supernatural stuff over it any day, but when they're done well torture flicks can be nice movies.  And this movie was actually decent to watch.  Also, if you can score the DVD version there is an absolutely hilarious deleted scene you should check out.

G'DAY!

--PXA