Review: Wolf Creek
Filed under: Horror, Critical Thought, Review Roundup
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Moira Macdonald of
The Seattle Times walked out of Wolf Creek but reviewed it anyway, in the form of an editorial
explaining why it was not worth reviewing. Roger Ebert dusted off his zero-star review, denouncing the film as
something that he could not sit through "without dismay." Other critics have responded similarly. Ok, fine.
But my question is this: why does it cause less dismay for these critics to sit through comedies like the Friday
the 13th and Scream films, which make sight gags of slashed-up bodies, heads crushed like walnuts and
popped-out eyeballs? Consider this tidbit from Ebert's review of a recent Michael Myers film: "There is a scene in
the movie where a kid drops a corkscrew down a garbage disposal.....I am thinking, if this kid doesn't lose his hand, I
want my money back." No dismay there. The key stylistic change between that film and Wolf Creek is that
in Wolf Creek, death is not played for laughs. The characters are not glaring stereotypes, and the
audience is primed to take their potential torture and death seriously. The director wants you to be legitimately
scared or to cry, as some people around me in the theater were doing, when the carnage begins. So, why is that no
longer a legitimate aim of horror cinema? Why is writer/director Greg McLean being castigated for doing his job
effectively?
To back up a bit, Wolf Creek is an Australian production that was self-evidently
financed for a song, with five or six speaking parts and no sets to speak of. The plot could fit on a post-it: three
teenagers encounter a homicidal Crocodile Dundee during a sight-seeing trip in Who Knows Where, Australia. There's an
opening credit statement about the story being based on this or that true event, but it has no gravity since we've been
fooled before. Thank the Coens. Director McLean opens the show by plunging us into a drunken revelry, with college-age
hooligans splashing down drinks and jumping headlong into a swimming pool – this is how Aussies say goodbye,
apparently. Good old bloke Ben (Nathan Phillips), impressively-chested Kristy (Kestie Morassi) and thin-lipped brunette
Liz (Cassandra McGrath) are being seen off on a long excursion. They are traveling by car to a national landmark - an
enormous crater with a circumference that stretches more than a few city blocks. The director has given no clues by
this point (except for the ominous opening statement) that danger is afoot, which is to his credit. There's nothing
worse than a horror film that feels compelled to extend one long note of creepiness from start to finish. It's much
scarier when it sneaks up on you.
I'll keep the spoiling to a minimum and tell you that the car will break down and the three heroes will unwisely accept a ride to a remote farmhouse. At least one of them will be captured, bound and subjected to a routine of pitiless psychological and physical torture that includes having a rifle fired near their head and being told convincingly that they are about to be raped and killed. There's a lot of screaming in the film, and it hits our ears as authentic because it doesn't dissipate in time to allow other characters to speak. Stepping on each others' lines is always a good trick for actors, and in this case it adds to the effectiveness of a couple of scenes. There's also some begging and some unwanted sexual interplay between the kidnapper/torturer and victim, which is what I imagine goes on between kidnapper/torturers and their victims, so it doesn't really seem appropriate to put the director in the dock for allowing it into the film. Is it the scent of misogyny that has ruffled the feathers of the critics so much, or is it the issue of psychological torture in general? There's not a big tradition in mainstream American horror films of psychological pain inflicted on victims - it's seen as something akin to unsportsmanlike conduct.
Victims in a typical American slasher film will stumble around in the dark for a while, opening closets and backing into darkened rooms until they finally get a knife in the back. Then it's on to the next one. There are always at least four or five characters lined up to be butchered in such films, probably to avoid a fixation on one particular victim and the natural discomfort that crops up when we are asked to focus on one character's suffering. American slasher victims are also aggressively devoid of any personality, so much so that their eventual retirement from the story is a non-event. They didn't exist before and they don't exist after. Wolf Creek, probably by being foreign-made, is refreshingly free of these studio-enforced conventions. Its characters are very slight, but they don't actively fight our attempts to see them as plausible human beings. They don't speak in one-liners. What you get is a film that is ninety percent chase-and-escape and ten percent vomit-inducing violence. It makes an honest attempt to scare us, which is no more morally reprehensible than a comedy that tries to make us laugh. I wish the critics who have been so quick to upbraid the makers of this film would do a better job of explaining what makes it so much more unpalatable to them than the typical plate of slasher piffle dished out every summer.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-02-2006 @ 9:35AM
shawn said...
i think ebert says in his review that when i filmmaker is good at making films like this that means worse of an experiance at the movie theatre for him.
Reply
1-02-2006 @ 8:43PM
Gilbert Davis said...
Ok. You said and I quote, "The director wants you to be legitimately scared or to cry, as some people around me in the theater were doing, when the carnage begins. So, why is that no longer a legitimate aim of horror cinema?"
It's very simple. The despicable and heinious movie that you are referencing as a 'horror' movie bears the same relation to a horror movie as Debbie Does Dallas does to a love story. It is a legitimate goal of a movie director to scare you and horrify you and even to make you cry. For instance, the movie Alien scares me. The movie Saving Private Ryan horrified me with depictions of war. The movie Old Yeller made me cry. (when I was young) Various movies do variously good jobs or bad jobs of bringing emotions out of me.
Debbie Does Dallas is not a love story, it's a sex film. It's main function is to arouse sexual urges generally for the purpose of seeing those urges satisfied. They didn't wear raincoats in old porno theaters for nothing you know. It's not a love story and while some of the same emotions may 'come to the surface' while viewing it, you can't confuse it with Titanic which come to think of it, sounds like a good porno movie title to me.
The activity described by Roger Ebert and other movie reviewers of the movie you are talking about is horrific. It's gratuitious and only pleasurable to those people who actually enjoy hurting and torturing people. It goes beyond horror. You as the viewer are not horrified as you would be by watching a horror movie, you are horrified the same way you would be horrified by watching video of a slaughterhouse. The director of this movie either did not understand the distinction or purposely went beyond it. And as free speech is not a license to go without criticism this director is on the receiving end of the free speech rights of those critics who have called him out rather than to quietly let it pass. As for critics who have been quick to 'upbraid' everyone involved in this horror show, I don't know of any evidence which would support the idea that Roger Ebert or the other reviewer you mention had in fact taken any less time in crafting their words than they normally do.
Reply
1-03-2006 @ 10:46PM
starlen said...
I'm assuming this line:
The activity described by Roger Ebert and other movie reviewers of the movie you are talking about is horrific.
means that Gilbert didn't actually watch the film. You can describe the activities of a lot of films to similar diminishing effect, but it doesn't tell you anything about the film itself (in fact, a summation of The Silence of the Lambs could sound just as awful or more awful than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but that doesn't tell you anything about the differences between the two films). And if Gilbert is assuming that this film is the Debbie Does Dallas to Alien's Titanic, what is his metaphor supposed to mean - what improper urges is this film supposedly raising and then satisfying? Did I watch this film to have my daily monthly allowance of sadism fulfilled? Or, if we take the Debbie Does Dallas analogy to its extent, was this film supposed to make me want to kill?
I did watch this film. I did squirm. It scared me. I didn't revel in sadism or cruelty, and the film wasn't asking me to. Having seen the film (ahem), I think Ryan's review is pretty spot-on, and I found myself similarly confused by the other reviews I read. Ebert praises Last House on the Left, despite the fact that it does contain a more exploitive aspect to its violence (contrasting the cops as slapstick against the sadism of the killers with the girls provides for a tone of sensationalism, and then Craven provides an over-the-top, unrealistic revenge release valve for the audience), and was a poor retread of a Bergman film to boot. He even defended the Devil's Rejects for the same reasons he excoriates this film; his inability to frame Wolf Creek in a similar context is baffling.
If anything, I think that the turns in the film's end create a more subtle version of the effect of Haneke's Funny Games - by not providing the audience the expected turn of events, we are truly shocked. Denied of the resolve and release so often given in "thrill ride" horror films, the viewer is left to question the implications of violence in popular media. While this may be playing both sides of the fence, it's a worthwhile exercise.
Also, for the record, the film does seem to hew fairly closely to real life, if you look up Ivan Milat, a serial killer caught in Australia in the early 1990s.
Reply
1-04-2006 @ 5:13PM
john allen said...
Let me preface this by saying that I am a huge horror movie fan, (my favorite is "Evil Dead 2"), and that Rob Zombie is my favorite musician. Even so, I find that any reviewer who would give "The Devil's Rejects," a thumbs up and "Wolf Creek," a thumbs down shows, at least to me, a serious lapse in judgement. While "Rejects" revels in its sadism, "Wolf Creek," merely purports to show that there are incredibly brutal and sadistic people out there. That's what makes it scary, while "Rejects" is merely pathetic and laughable. "Wolf Creek" was shot in an almost documentary style way because it is based on true events. To be scared and horrified at "Wolf Creek," is to be scared of the evil that exists in mankind. To enjoy "The Devil's Rejects" is to enjoy the evil that exists in oneself.
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