6/25/14: He’ll Talk Your Ear Right Off

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anti-tourism films, Australia, Australian films, Australian horror films, cinema, drinking songs, Film, film reviews, Greg McLean, head-on-a-stick, horror, horror film, horror franchises, horror movies, John Jarratt, Mick Taylor, Movies, pig hunting, Ryan Corr, sequels, serial killer, the Outback, torture porn, Wolf Creek, Wolf Creek 2, writer-director

If you think about it, writer-director Greg McLean is like a one-man “anti-tourism” board for the great nation of Australia. McLean’s first two films, Wolf Creek (2005) and Rogue (2007), seemed bound and determined to make sure that folks stay far away from the Land Down Under: after all, he’s given us an unstoppable serial killer who targets tourists and a massive, man-eating crocodile that targets tourists…by this point, McLean could probably direct a reboot of Short Circuit (1986) and have Number 5 slaughter tourists. In some ways, it’s a decidedly niche acre to plow but it’s all McLean’s and he’s done amazingly well with it. The first Wolf Creek was a nasty modern classic, a frequently revolting, tough as nails horror film that introduced the world to Mick Taylor, the grinning, sadistic purveyor of the “head-on-a-stick.” As portrayed by John Jarratt, Mick was an instantly memorable character: a crude, racist, blood-thirsty pig-hunter who wanted to keep Australia “for the Australians”: if it meant massacring every foreign tourist he came across, well, so be it. There was real power in the character of Mick, a queasy combination of tough-guy “cool” and pure, unadulterated evil: Mick was charismatic and crazy as a shit-house rat…never a good combination.

When it was announced that McLean would be returning to the character of Mick, after almost a decade, I found myself wondering how this might work out. After all, I never thought that Wolf Creek had the potential to be a franchise: it was just too gritty and mean-spirited, for one thing but the character of Mick was also problematic. As we’ve seen with Freddy, sequels can often have a way of leaching the sinister cool from a villain, turning them from pure evil into something resembling a mass-murdering Henny Youngman. As portrayed in the first film, Mick had just the proper balance of dead-eyed evil and smarmy attitude: would McLean be able to keep this balance or would Mick begin a journey that would lead him to the same land of one-liners as Freddy and the Wishmaster? In many ways, Wolf Creek 2 (2013) is a much different beast than its predecessor, more of a bleak action film than a stalk-and-slash torture porn, similar to the difference between Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). But what about Mick? Does the Outback boogeyman still possess the ability to freeze the blood or has he joined the comedy circuit?

Wolf Creek 2 kicks off in high-fashion with a couple of corrupt highway patrolmen pulling over Mick’s truck, by way of a speed trap. The two cops are complete assholes, both belligerent and belittling to our “anti-hero” and the look on Mick’s face pretty much says it all: “Not a lot of pigs down south,” he sniffs, eyeing the high-powered rifle hanging in his truck cab, and the hog-hunter’s emphasis is pretty clear. Sure enough, as the cops take off, celebrating their “fun” with Mick, he calmly blows off the top half of the driver’s head (in a scene so astoundingly gory that it almost becomes parody), causing the car to flip. Mick calmly tracks the wounded survivor as he crawls from the wreckage, incapacitating him with a knife to his spinal cord (the aforementioned “head-on-a-stick”) before carrying him back to the car, strapping him in, soaking the whole thing in petrol and burning him alive. Mick walks off into the Outback, smiling, and we roll credits. It’s an intense, bravura, horrifying way to open the film and a pretty unforgettable way to reintroduce us to the bastard that is Mick Taylor.

The movie, proper, begins with a couple of young, energetic German tourists, Katarina (Shannon Ashlyn) and Rutger (Philippe Klaus), hitchhiking through the Outback. “Born to Be Wild” is on the soundtrack, the kids are having fun, it’s a sunny day and everything’s groovy. The pair is heading for Wolf Creek Crater which, as astute fans will remember, is ol’ Mick’s stomping grounds. As they travel, Rutger experiences some frustration with getting drivers to stop and pick them up: he complains about the loss of “community” and “altruism,” taking to task people who are afraid of foreigners and strangers. Rutger, of course, won’t know how bad the situation is until Mick stops by their campsite that evening. He’s come to tell them that there’s no camping in the national park areas and to offer them a ride back to town: Rutger is right to be suspicious, since the only things on Mick’s mind are carnage and rape, not necessarily in that order. After Rutger prevents Mick from assaulting Katarina, he gets dismembered for his troubles, allowing his companion to sneak away. “Hide and seek, eh,” Mick giggles when he discovers Katarina gone…and we’re off to the races.

From this point on, Wolf Creek 2 becomes a bit of a chase film, as Mick pursues first Katarina and then the poor, unlucky shlub, Paul (Ryan Corr), who makes the drastic (if noble) mistake of trying to help Katarina. The rest of the film entails the cat-and-mouse chase between Mick and Paul, as the terrified British tourist is chased from one end of the Outback to the other. Mick is intent on only one thing: punishing Paul for getting between him and “his meal.” Despite Paul’s best efforts, he’s not much of a match for Mick and the film swings into another mode as Mick finally catches up to Paul, becoming the torture porn film that the original was. Will Paul be able to survive the horrors that Mick intends to inflict on him? How good is Paul at Australian trivia? And what, exactly, does Mick intend to do with the electric belt sander? All these (and more) await within.

Right off the bat, as mentioned above, Wolf Creek 2 is much less a horror film than an adrenalized, gritty cat-and-mouse chase, with enough jawdropping gore and horror elements to keep a foot firmly in each camp. While I wasn’t expecting this, I must admit that it was an effective tact, for a while, at least. For a time, Ryan Coor’s Paul is actually a pretty good match for Mick, out-driving and out-maneuvering him, which lends the film a bit of the feel of a ’70s Ozploitation movie. Unfortunately, at some point, Paul turns into a whiny shit, which drastically reduces the association one can feel with him: it’s much easier to associate with an asskicker who won’t give up than it is with a crying dude blowing snot bubbles. In a way, this is odd criticism, since the first film was filled with whiny victims. Perhaps Paul’s “change of personailty” is so troubling because it takes him from hero territory, which is new to the Wolf Creek films, right back into simpering victim territory. On the whole, I would’ve liked Paul a lot more if he’d been more consistent: hard to tell if this is an issue with McLean or with actor Ryan Coor, although I’m willing to lay the blame at both their feet.

But what about Mick? As we know from the first film, these films (like most films like this) are all about the badguy: how does he stack up this time around? Unfortunately, not so well. As I feared earlier, Mick has begun to drift heavily in the direction of “wise-cracking killer,” ala Freddy, and this significantly reduces a lot of the fear around him. While John Jarratt is still a massively impressive presence as Mick, this is a decided step-down from the original portrayal. Quite frankly, Mick talks way too much: he has a one-liner for the murdered cops, quips for the German tourists, plenty of jokes for Paul…it just goes on and on. In the first film, Mick was a silent, grinning shark, an unstoppable killing machine who was so terrifying precisely because he was such an enigma: he could, literally, have formed fully sprung from the Outback, for all we knew. In Wolf Creek 2, not only is Mick one talkative fucker but he also has a clearly delineated mission: keep Australia safe from non-Australians. While this goal formed the subtext of the first film, it’s the entire context of the sequel. Time after time, Mick takes care to explain how the tourists only come there to “shit in his backyard” and have no respect for the country. He mocks the Germans national heritage and incorporates British/Australian conflicts into his impromptu trivia game, making his point all to clear. This is not to say that horror movie killers don’t need agendas (even Freddy had one) but the “anti-tourism” angle in Wolf Creek 2 just seems like a shorthand way to fill out Mick’s character. The more we know about Mick, however, the less he seems like unholy evil and the more he comes across like a racist redneck. Again, this was subtextual in the first film but McLean goes all-in on the sequel. It reminds me of the current trend (thanks, Rob Zombie) to explain, in detail, the origins of horror killers: the more we know, the less terrifying it becomes.

Despite my disappointment with the “evolution” of Mick and the mess that Paul became, how does the film actually hold up when compared to the first film? Not surprisingly, Wolf Creek 2 manages to amp up the gore and setpieces but loses out on much of the claustrophobic, hopeless atmosphere that made the first film such a horror classic. I won’t lie: there are some pretty spectacular setpieces in the film but most of them end up being more action than horror-oriented. One of the most bravura, if disturbing, scenes in the whole film is the one where Mick steals a semi-truck, turns on “In the Jungle”, and proceeds to plow through an entire herd of kangaroos, all in the pursuit of Paul. The scene is sickening, disturbing and, quite frankly, utterly amazing: it goes miles towards establishing Mick’s character without the need for pithy quips and is one of the best setpieces I’ve seen in years. Equally impressive is the trivia scene, where Mick tests Paul’s knowledge of Australian history. The scene is masterfully set-up, veering from torture porn distress to genuine comedy and back to the torture: it messes with audience expectations in a big way and provides one of the few examples of the sequel trumping the original.

Ultimately, Wolf Creek 2 is an odd film: McLean ends the movie in a way that all but guarantees a sequel, yet there’s the distinct notion that any future films will continue to expand on Mick’s new “stand-up comic” personality, which is pretty much a lose-lose situation. Perhaps, as such a fan of the first film, I went into this with unfair expectations. Truth be told, Wolf Creek 2 is an extremely well-made film, filled with some absolutely gorgeous Australian scenery and some truly gut-wrenching violence. The film is miles above most similar fare, particularly 90% of the odious torture porn subgenre, which makes it much better than many horror films out there. And yet, at the end of the day, I can’t help but feel let-down. I went into the film expecting the same unbelievably tense, gritty, nihilistic atmosphere as the first film but ended up with something distinctly more goofy, action-packed and run-of-the-mill. While I was a huge fan of McLean’s first two films, I can’t help but feel that Wolf Creek 2 is a solid step down into more generic “genre” territory. Here’s to hoping that McLean rights the ship for his next feature: I’d hate to think that the king of feel-bad cinema was about to abdicate his throne but his newest is almost the definition of “reduced expectations.” My advice? Next time, tell Mick more choppin’ and less yappin’.

6/6/14 (Part One): All the Little Devils are Proud of Hell

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1970's cinema, Al Thomas, alcohol abuse, animal cruelty, animal massacre, Australia, Australian films, auteur theory, based on a book, bonded teacher, Bundanyabba, Chips Rafferty, cinema, civilized vs savage, depression, desolation, Doc Tydon, Donald Pleasence, drama, Film auteurs, film review, films, First Blood, gambling, Gary Bond, homoerotic tension, hunting, isolation, Jack Thompson, John Grant, John Meillon, kangaroo hunt, Kenneth Cook, male friendships, mining town, Movies, North Dallas Forty, obnoxious friends, Peter Whittle, Purgatory, repressed sexuality, school teacher, stranded, Sylvia Kay, Ted Kotcheff, the Outback, the Yabba, Tiboonda, Tim Hynes, Uncommon Valor, urban vs rural, Wake in Fright, wasteland

Many times, we discuss vacations in terms of “getting away from it all.” The presumption, obviously, is that we’re getting away from all of the tedious, mundane and unpleasant aspects of our daily lives: all of the annoying things like 9-5 jobs, chores, responsibilities and anonymous authority figures. People will hike deep into the woods, sail away to the middle of the ocean and climb the tallest mountains possible, all in the pursuit of “getting away from it all” and finding some internal serenity. In a day and age where we all seem to be alarmingly “plugged in” almost 24 hours/day, there’s something not only attractive but downright necessary about dialing everything back to a more simple level: just “us” and nature, our phones on silent and our brains turned off. By “getting away from it all,” we’re actually hoping to get back to ourselves, that core version that exists below the commitments of civilized society.

But what if we went so far away from polite society that we ended up in an altogether darker place? What if our quest for internal peace and discovery of the self led us not to personal evolution but to devolution? Is it possible to embrace our primitive, savage ids so much that we become nothing but flesh-sacks for volcanic, primal emotions like lust, hate, fear and the need to inflict pain? Getting away from the everyday bullshit of polite society is a noble goal but it leads to a dangerously slippery slope: once we’ve begun to accept a more primal, savage lifestyle, we automatically become at odds with the rest of the “civilized” world. As Nietzsche so eloquently put it, “When you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” In Ted Kotcheff’s disturbing Wake in Fright (1971), we get the distinctly perverse pleasure of witnessing someone not only stare into the abyss but get consumed and shat out the other end.

It’s Christmas vacation for bonded school teacher John Grant (Gary Bond) and he eagerly closes the doors on his one-room schoolhouse in the tiny Outback town of Tiboonda, looking forward to his next six weeks of leisure. He’s heading for the bright lights of Sidney but must take a train to the small mining town of Bundanyabba in order to catch his flight. Ostensibly only in town for the evening, John takes a rather dim view of the hard-drinking, overly “friendly” locals: their earthy behavior is at decided odds with his more “civilized” big-city upbringing. As a local tells him, however, the “Yabba” is actually the best place in Australia: no one cares where you are or where you come from, as long as you’re a “good bloke”. John meets one of these “good blokes” in the person of Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty), a local state trooper who proceeds to buy him one beer after the other at a local pub. When John complains that he’s hungry and would rather eat than drink, Jock thinks for a moment and does the most sensible thing: he takes John to a different bar so that he can order a steak along with the booze. “Best dollar you’ll ever spend,” Jock reckons, as he leaves John in the less than capable hands of local sawbones Doc Tydon (Donald Pleaseance).

Tydon is an amazing character, a slovenly, feral, ridiculously self-assured train-wreck who deflates the previously positive affirmations of the Yabba with the ominous declaration that “all the little devils are proud of Hell.” It’s here that John also gets introduced to the backroom gambling game of two-up, which involves betting on the flipping of a pair of coins. In a classic example of the fatal flaw, John initially scoofs at the game, before becoming intrigued, betting and winning. Unable to leave well enough alone, John continues to bet (and win), all with the hope of earning the $1000 bond necessary to buy his way out of Tiboonda and end his perceived servitude. He displays an amazing streak of luck, all the way up to the point where he loses all of his money. And, just like that, John’s one-night stay in the Yabba is about to turn into a whole lot more.

Unable to pay for his flight, John watches helplessly the next morning as it flies away overhead. He visits the local labor exchange but it’s closed: the only place that actually seems open is the bar (of course) and John drags himself there to spend his final coins on some sweet, if temporary, escape. Once there, John meets Tim Hynes (Al Thomas), another “good bloke” who buys him multiple drinks (after shouting down John’s initial protests) and takes him home to drink some more (pretty much the official past-time of the Yabba). Once there, John meets Tim’s strange daughter, Janette (Sylvia Kay), who mopes around silently while John and Tim continue to drink until they pass out, at which point they’re roused by Tim’s obnoxious friends, Dick (Jack Thompson) and Joe (Peter Whittle) for more drunken debauchery. After Doc Tydon shows up, Janette sneaks the blotto John away for a little drunken making out session, although his contribution to things pretty much begins and ends with puking on her. When John passes out, he wakes up in the Doc’s absolutely filthy pigsty of a home, a place that looks just like the dreadful Turkish prison in Midnight Express (1978). This leads to more drinking, of course (as Tydon tells him, Yabba water is only for washing, not drinking), while leads to more debauchery which leads to an absolutely horrifying kangaroo hunt, drunken rampage and possible rape. As John gets further and further away from his former gentle “civilized” nature, he finds himself in a shadowy world where the only diversions from a brutally bleak life are drinking, fucking, killing, fighting and destroying. Will John be able to pull himself out before he’s lost forever? Or will he end up just another permanent resident of the Yabba? And, in the end, can anyone ever really leave the Yabba?

It’s quite possible for a film to be both utterly intriguing and fairly repellent and Wake in Fright is certainly both of those things. On a purely narrative level, the film makes imperfect sense, existing somewhere between a fever dream and the French New Wave. Thanks to the editing style, which helps to heighten the sense of disorientation, it’s often difficult to establish continuity or, in some cases, even establish quite what’s going on. More often than not, the film is aggressively unpleasant: ‘roo hunt notwithstanding (and we’ll address that shortly), there’s a groddy, dirty edge to everything that makes a heady stew when combined with the sense of vast, open isolation and personal fatalism. The Yabba definitely appears to be some sort of a stand-in for Purgatory (or perhaps Hell, depending on how you look at it) and any satisfaction wrung from watching poor John Grant descend into its depths is grim, indeed. It’s not so much that John is a really good guy: he seems like a perfectly average guy, which makes his destruction, somehow, more upsetting. We can cheer if a “bad guy” gets his come-uppance and smirk when an unnaturally pure “white knight” fails. When a “normal” person fails, however, especially if they fail thanks to essentially good reasons (John keeps betting because he wants to get out of Tiboonda so he can be reunited with his girlfriend in Sidney), it hits a bit closer to home. John could be any of us, under the right circumstances: his degradation and destruction could be ours.

Despite how unpleasant the film ends up being, it’s a consistently fascinating film, thanks in no small part to the exceptional cast and stellar filmmaking. Donald Pleaseance, in particular, is absolutely amazing: Doc Tydon is the id in flesh and Pleaseance doesn’t so much chew the scenery as immediately become the center of any scene he’s in. Whether standing on his head while drinking a beer, cutting the balls off a dead kangaroo, graphically describing his sex life with Janette or engaging in a little drunken, homoerotic semi-nude wrestling with John, Doc Tydon is a ferociously alive, unrepentant, hedonist. More animal than man, Tydon may actually be the Yabba, a living personification of this hard-scrabble area that grinds men into pulp in the mines and pours the remains straight into the bars. I could practically smell Tydon’s stench through the screen, thanks to Pleaseance’s firebrand performance, and that’s no small compliment.

Gary Bond is good as John Grant but there’s not a whole lot required of his character: he’s a strictly reactive force and spends more time wobbling about in a state of semi-coherence than actually developing in any given direction. While it’s easy to empathize with John, it’s difficult to truly like the guy: he’s given the opportunity to climb out of the hole on multiple occasions but always seems to choose the path of least resistance (which, of course, is usually the worst path). Unlike Tydon, John takes no pleasure in his debauchery: as such, he tends to vacillate between confusion and moral agony.

From a filmmaking standpoint, Wake in Fright is exquisitely crafted. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous and shows off the vast, epic emptiness of the Outback to great effect. The opening shot, a slowly revolving wide-shot that shows us the entire, tiny emptiness of Tiboonda in one, smooth 360-degree motion, is an amazing mood setter. Equally impressive is the score, which manages to swing from lighter to oppressive on the drop of a hat: the weird, eerie “sci-fi” theramins that kick in after John loses all of his money and begins his descent are a really nice touch, as are the droning tones that inform the latter half of the score. The score is a perfect example of subtly building atmosphere and mood without resorting to overly obvious musical stingers.

Despite all of the things to recommend here, I must admit that I didn’t really care for Wake in Fright. The film left me cold, which isn’t necessarily a problem, but it also left me queasy on many occasions, which is a more significant issue. One of the main reasons for this, although certainly not the only reason, is the astoundingly awful scene where Tim, Joe, Dick and the Doc take John out kangaroo hunting. I’d heard rumors about this scene, which apparently features actual footage from a real kangaroo hunt, but nothing I imagined could have prepared me for the actual film. The closest thing I can compare the hunt to would be parts of Pier Pasolini’s Salo (1977) or the disgusting animal footage in Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1985). As with those films, I will freely admit to looking away from the screen at times: there’s simply no way that anyone who loves animals (and I’m pretty much a fanatic) could watch the wholesale kangaroo butchery without dying a little inside. This is compounded with a bit (I’m assuming staged but only because I would never want to entertain the alternative) where John Grant graphically stabs a wounded baby kangaroo to death, while the guys cheer him on, hooting and hollering. Wake in Fright is not, technically speaking, a horror film but the kangaroo hunt is easily the most horrific thing that I believe I’ve seen in some 30 years of movie watching…and that says a lot.

Ultimately, I’m not sure whether to recommend Wake in Fright or not. The film will certainly not be for everyone and I can see quite a few people turning it off midway through (for better or worse, the ‘roo hunt really does draw a line in the sand). There was also much about the film that still mystifies me, including the question of what, exactly, happened between John and the Doc. As an important piece of Australia’s New Wave, Wake in Fright certainly bears discussion with films like Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Last Wave (1977), although I’m less fond of it than either of those films. In certain ways, parts of Wake in Fright even prefigure modern-day Aussie exports like Wolf Creek 2 (2013), which features its own variation on the kangaroo slaughter. Australia has always had a vibrant and fascinating film industry and astute viewers could do worse than rummage through their 1970’s back catalog. That being said, Wake in Fright is pretty strong stuff and I can’t honestly see myself revisiting it anytime soon. The Yabba might be an interesting place to visit but I sure as hell don’t wanna live there.