Oz goes La La.

Greg McLean’s WOLF CREEK (2005) was a good movie for a number of reasons, one of them being, it was a body-horror thriller removed from the “Hollywood” system. It oozed Made in Oz. But WOLF CREEK 2, even though helmed by the same director-writer, looks and feels like La La Land.

Maybe because it took eight years to start production; maybe because McLean brought in a co-writer (Aaron Sterns); maybe because McLean got an offer he couldn’t refuse from his funders, who insisted that for their money he’d better gloss it up and sell it Stateside like a MAD MAX franchise.

All we know is: the filmmakers pushed the envelope on violence, body-horror, car stunts, runtime, padding, torture, and Pretty Orange Explosions. Exactly the formula Hollywood employs when it grinds out a sequel. The only true blue Aussie thing remaining – is Mick Taylor the serial killer. And there’s even something not right with him, besides his penchant for rape and torture.

Mick is now the hero.

In literate society they call it Stockholm Syndrome. McLean has succumbed to that decidedly American trope of re-painting the bad guy as the good guy. But Mick’s still a serial killer, you say. Yes, but now you WANT to see him molesting women and creatively carving surfer bois. He is so “beloved” now that Mick is onscreen from the first scene, in a trope usually reserved for the hero of the film – showing off his principles, his machismo and his daring; in this case, two crooked cops give Mick an undeserved speeding ticket, and Mick promptly wipes them both off the face of the Earth. Yes, it’s satisfying and vicariously exciting, but this conceptual change in the tone of the movie annoys me from the outset. Mick is Clint Eastwood meets Wolverine meets The Terminator.

How American.

The first WOLF CREEK opened with a party, as we followed three kids on a backpacking journey. The villain did not appear until an hour into the movie. We were in the normal world until it was upended by the serial killer. (I even made mention of that filmic technique; of keeping calm and even-keeled, so that the madness to come is accentuated.) Now: we start with two over-the-top cop murders in the cold open, then the titles, then a party; thus, now the party people seem like they are intruding into Mick’s world, and in Mick’s world, serial killing is OK.

These insidious mind-tricks are not enough to totally diminish the escapism of watching a fantasy about a serial killer, but they manipulate us into hypocrisy.

“Cor blimey, mate! You’ve come a gutsa! Nothin’ that a slab an’ a shiela won’t fix!
And Bob’s ya mother’s brother!”

Mick Taylor (played once again with ocker brio by John Jarratt), claims two young German victims soon after that Generic Party, finding them camping at his usual deserted hunting ground, Wolf Creek Crater. Rutger (Philippe Klaus) and Katarina (Shannon Ashlyn) turn down Mick’s genial offer to drive them to a hotel, whereupon Mick grabs Rutger and stabs him in the kidneys. Well, that escalated quickly.

Maybe the Germans couldn’t understand that godawful Strine.

Once again, the movie could easily derail were it not for the reactions of the victims. Director McLean, as he did with the first movie, still pulls compelling performances from people who are caught out confronting malice that they cannot process. Graphically dismembering Rutger is the movie’s most disturbing scene, and Katarina’s screams are from her soul. This is the man she was just snuggling with; the past they shared, the future they planned – gone, dead, nothingness. Mick, in that gargling snigger, pulls back and saws on the lifeless neck of the man she loved and it comes off in his hands – and there is madness in her bulging eyes. Choking, shuddering, twitching, her mind breaking at the sight. Mick promises her they are gonna spend a nice warm few months together…

Still, see how quickly they got to the stabbing. No buildup, no drama. When Katarina runs, she is picked up by a guy in a car. At least she and her boyfriend got a one-day montage before Mick hunkered in – this guy in the car gets NO characterization. We only learn his name is Paul (Ryan Corr), and from his accent, we hear he’s British, and his whole deal is just fleeing with Katarina in his car with Mick on his tail. That’s why the movie feels disjointed from this point, because Katarina is shot and killed by Mick, and our attention is suddenly turned to Paul – a nobody who stumbled onto the scene, and is now seemingly the focus of Mick’s attention (and, by association, our attention).

Padding ensues. Mick steals a semi-trailer and now it’s DUEL.

Vehicle stunts are flat out like a lizard drinkin’, including a mob of kangaroos stampeding across the freeway and being mowed down by the semi – crikey! – however, we’ve lost the throughline. Who is the hero and what is he trying to achieve? Well, everyone else is dead, so I guess we’re stuck with THIS one-dimensional Paul character that we don’t really care for because we know nothing about him, except that he’s running from Mick– Wait – is Mick the hero? Don’t do this to us, movie…

Paul’s car half-drives/half-flies down a steep mountainside and smashes into a rock. Paul thinks it’s over. We know it’s not. Still, we are unprepared for one of the greatest vehicle stunts ever – as the semi-trailer careens over the top of the incline, maximum air, arcing down the mountain and slamming into Paul’s car at the bottom–

CUT TO: Paul tied in chair, Mick about to cut his tongue out—

At least, that’s what should have happened. Instead, tedious chase padding ensues – only to end up at the same place – Paul in the chair, in the film’s premier scene. Paul somehow stays Mick’s hand by unexpectedly launching into Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport, a legendary Aussie rural ditty. Mick’s curiosity is piqued and he proposes giving this “Pommy cunt” a fighting chance with a game of “10 Questions – answer five correctly and you go free!” This morbid (and informative) sequence is as compelling as Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper facing off in TRUE ROMANCE.

“For each one you get wrong, I get to grind up a finger.”

And Mick lets fly his psychopath xenophobe flag: “You’re nothing but foreign vermin, a stinking introduced species. And it’s up to my kind to wipe your kind out!” Hmm, the xenophobia seems retconned, considering Mick’s male victim in the last film was a fair dinkum Aussie.

But here’s the real crime about this xenophobic outburst: Mick had no idea Paul was British until after he captured him. And even then, Mick had no clue of Paul’s heritage while he was tying him to the chair – it was only when Paul SPOKE that Mick heard Paul’s British accent. So in Mick’s final threat, is the movie saying that if Paul was Aussie, Mick would let him go? So Mick’s pathological chasing of Paul was because…? Sorry to say that in these last few minutes, writer-director Greg McLean got more lost than his victims at Wolf Creek. But I’m sure Dumbo Donald would be happy his message of racism has reached Downunda!

WOLF CREEK 2 opens with the same title cards as its predecessor: “30,000 people are reported missing in Australia every year” and “based on real events.” Well, not really. Then the outro title cards really discredit the movie’s “true” tag, as we are told the authorities ignored Paul’s claims of an outback gunman. Even with all those unsolved murder cases, you guys don’t wanna send out a little reconnoiter party or some-such? No? Instead, we get the last indication that McLean has gone Total Hollywood: the hero shot of Mick, like The Man With No Name, striding away from camera, fading into the outback haze, a mythic wraith, a silent guardian, a dark knight.…

Strewth!

END

Tourist hotties. Psycho ocker. Unconscionable Strine.

Three young backpackers visit WOLF CREEK meteorite crater in Western Australia, on a killer vacation.

Two British girls, Liz (skinny, square-jawed Cassandra Magrath) and Kristy (blond busty Kestie Morassi) team up with low-education-taut-abs Sydney surfer-boy Ben (Nathan Phillips), to drive across Australia in a shitbox he just purchased, hitting tourist hotspots along the way. Without a care in the world – until their car won’t start at the deserted crater.

That night, a weathered bushie in a workhorse truck named Mick Taylor (John Jarratt) stumbles upon the kids, his ocker accent broad enough to kill a snow white boomer. They accept his Aussie hospitality to tow them to his place and fix their car. After an hours-long drive, they arrive at what looks like an industrial compound, where they have a drink around a fire with the amiable Mick, who seems like a lonely soul who just likes to jabber to the few strangers he must occasionally encounter all the way out here. In the middle of nowhere…

Skinny wakes up bound and gagged on the floor of a filthy shed. While Mick tortures Tits with sharp tools in another shed. While Abs is nailed to a wall in another shed. So begins the ordeal.

And Australian cinema would never be the same.

How we can tell that someone is truly insane: The chick is tied to the pole with her clothes on.

Produced, written and directed by Greg McLean in a fair dinkum debut, what sells WOLF CREEK as a gritty grindhouse phenomenon are the incredible performances, especially the authentic horrified reactions of the victims.

We have grown too inured to cartoonish American horror reactions (for example: the high-pitched “EEEEEEEE!” female scream – a trope unironically exemplified in the irritating screams of every female in SPIDER-MAN 2, who sounded exactly the same, no matter their age, weight, health or social upbringing – and the macho male take-charge reaction), so we have forgotten what it would truly be like to shine your flashlight on decomposed human bodies near you, or to have your fingers suddenly sliced off, or to witness a hanging dead body with its upper half mutilated, and the flesh completely scraped from its lower skeleton, leaving only its sacrum and pelvic girdle exposed, and – no legs.

Low-throated yells, choked gargles of fear, strangled howls from your limbic brain, trying to imagine how that dead person’s mind must have twisted in on itself while being slowly murdered; when your own body is cut open, your face reacting to the circulatory shock of severed arteries suddenly gushing open, heart flailing with sudden depressurization of its closed circuit; no trying to look pretty for the cameras and tabloids. These are the kinds of reactions we get in WOLF CREEK, Greg McLean proving himself a director-producer of untold resourcefulness, able to achieve his iconoclastic vision with no budget!

The two girls effect a partial escape and one leaves the other alone to go back for a car; the abandoned girl jabbering incoherently, pleading, begging not to be left alone; it might seem irritating and childish, but we realize she is perfectly embodying someone who has just gone through such a traumatic experience – of being bloodied near a dismembered body, hanging not five feet away, her molester joking that he spent a few sweet months with that corpse “until I took her head off.” Reports that Morassi (Tits) pulled such a realistic, terrified performance when Mick was torturing her that female crew members were visibly distressed; at one point the director stopping a scene because he thought Jarratt was actually hurting her.

That’s how real this film is, Movie Maniacs.

Not just gore gore gore, WOLF CREEK is controlled filmmaking at its best. Shot on a HD handheld cam, director McLean is in no hurry to reveal the villain (who appears more than an hour into the runtime), as we crash an overnight party with the kids; laze the road trip, planned from Western Australia to Queensland on the east coast, taking in the grand Australian outback steakhouse vistas, feeling the grueling tarmac and sweltering heat (–by the way, Skinny wakes on the beach in Western Australia and sees the sunrise… uh, it’s the WEST coast, people… the sun doesn’t generally rise in the west – unless it wants a cameo in your indie film, I guess); the mutual attraction between Abs and Skinny, acted upon while overlooking the crater. All this is not so much to flesh out characters – they’re your basic good-lookin’ brats with not much going on up top – but to establish a sense of normalcy that will be shattered when they encounter the psychopath. (Still, we can’t help but feel sorry for the two, as they would have been hoping to fall into each other at the next campsite after sharing that one expectant kiss on the crater’s lip – and would sadly never get that opportunity!) McLean employs glutted, close-cut cinematography in the last act (to oppose the open-skied vistas in the first act) that pulls us hyperventilating into the desolation and claustrophobic horror of the kids.

The aerial shots show the actual Wolfe Creek Crater (different spelling – to protect the innocent crater?), in the northern part of Western Australia, but the film is shot in another state altogether – South Australia.

The jolly swagman Jarratt is cast seemingly to defy our expectations. Well-known in Australia since at least 1980, with his turn as a young, handsome Ned Kelly in THE LAST OUTLAW (anyone who plays Australia’s most infamous iron man is set for life!), he now looks like your larrikin uncle and sounds like Paul Hogan arguing with Steve Irwin. But proves himself as diabolical as Hannibal Lecter and unstoppable as a Terminator.

Wolf Creek: famous for its crater and its threeway picnics.

Opening title card claims WOLF CREEK is “based on real events” — if by “based on real events” they mean NOT based on real events. The closing title cards (“After 4 months in police custody, Ben Mitchell was later cleared of all suspicion…”) make it seem real, but there are no events in WOLF CREEK based on any real life cases, and all four characters are fictional; rather, writer-director Greg McLean drew inspiration from the 1989 “Backpacker Murders” in New South Wales, committed by Ivan Milat. (To be clear, though this felon serving 7 consecutive life sentences is cited in many discussions about WOLF CREEK – though never in the film itself – his murders and methods are in no way represented here or in this film’s sequel.)

Along with the commendable elements (a car going over a cliff and NOT exploding – how positively un-American!), there are annoying movie devices that seem very “American,” that drive the movie further into fiction. Like the wall of Exposition Newspaper Clippings (“Family Goes Missing in Western Australia” “Young Man Missing,” etc.), near the Exposition Video Camera, that Skinny peers through, and it’s conveniently cued to show a family befriending Mick and being towed by him – all perfectly edited to show their full fate in 20 seconds. Like we needed more evidence Mick has claimed numerous victims, with corpses cramming his kill-sheds fuller than a seaside dunny on Boxing Day.

Made on a shoestring of just over a million colorful Aussie dollars, WOLF CREEK has made back its budget nearly one-hundredfold worldwide over the years, and has secured its legacy as one of Australia’s premier gore-thrillers… so excuse my small personal gripe with the trope of the villain who loves mansplaining his methods. In Mick’s case, he tells a girl how he’s about to cripple her, to stop her from running away – to stop her from running at all! – so that our brains can explode in whimpering terror at the fact he is going to shut down the motor functions in her legs. (This was apparently what Milat did to his victims – severed their spines.) By verbalizing the medical strategy of his attack, Mick made it horrific; otherwise all we would see is an arbitrary shiv to her back and her wide-eyed, speechless shock as she falls. YET – in telling her out loud what he was doing, it subverted the horror because we know this dialogue is only for us. Would a serial killer psychopath rapist really care if his victim appreciated his surgical precision in crippling her – or would he save his breath for the rape? However, I can’t see another way to convey the primal terror. It’s a conundrum. Wrapped in a paradox. Under the shade of a Coolibah tree.

I wonder: Is Wolfe Creek tourism up or down?

END

Epic Saddlebag Superhero.

Being a son of Australia, this movie was calling to my blood. I had to watch it, right? I had to know it, feel it, taste it. And report back on whether it hides behind the faux-Aussie Outback Steakhouse jive, or whether it truly captures the wild frontier Dreamtime spirit of Downunda; the vast ochre countryscapes, the earthy indomitability of the fledgling nation… and Hugh Jackman’s sky-tanned, whip-leathered, torpedo-ripped, v-shaped body.

Drover Poffy

All of the above… No fake Outback Steakhouse accents in sight.

You’ve gotta have some ballsac to name your movie AUSTRALIA. It better be as epic as the story that drove a continent from convict colony to commonwealth.

Well, it’s Baz Luhrmann, so it’s gonna be stylish; it’s Nicole Kidman, so it’s gonna be painfully pretty; it’s Hugh Jackman, so it’s gonna be oozing sexual bacon like a piston on powerdrive.

Set in 1939, on the threshold of World War II, directed by Luhrmann, AUSTRALIA is a fitting update to the lowbrow image that CROCODILE DUNDEE burned into a blinkered world in 1986.

Kidman is Lady Sarah Ashley, who travels to Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory, to hold onto her middle-of-nowhere property against the clutches of land baron King Carney (Bryan Brown). She finds herself in a massive cattle drive with a ragtag team of drovers, led by a man known as Drover (Jackman, doing some fine tragic acting over and above his bacon).

What can a man say about Hugh Jackman without going slightly bi-curious in the process? I’ll try. I counted at least seven Superhero Entrances, three Sexiest Man Alive pose-downs and lost count of the times I was caught looking at his gun-belt slung so low that I accidentally imagined his package brushing against my naked face. (Failed again with that “bi-curious” thing…)

We meet Wolverine in a barroom brawl – big surprise! – biceps thrumming and wisecracks humming, his native Aussie accent so broad and true-blue I was flat out like a lizard drinkin’ tryin’ ta catch the Strine. Snooty Lady Ashley’s outspoken British disdain for this rowdy bushman tells us they are soon going to be tonguing breathlessly in the moonlight or dancing in the rain or running tearfully towards each other with uplifting music swelling the soundtrack.

Again: all of the above.

But now comes the element that separates this sloppy love story from its many mindless hormonal Teen Model copies.

It’s not just the soaring cinematography (AUSTRALIA must be viewed on the widest of wide screens); it’s not just Nicole Kidman’s padded baseball breasts straining against harsh schoolmarm blouses (eternally 23 years old, how come she has no pores?); it’s not just exhibiting bravery in killing kangaroos (the equivalent of killing American bald eagles – like the eagle, the kangaroo is a national symbol, but to a whole native people, the kangaroo is merely food); that which separates AUSTRALIA from the conveyor belt of epic, sweeping, tiresome love stories is… the Dreamtime – the rich, mysterious Aboriginal culture…

…embedded in this movie like the trail dust under Drover’s taut-buttocked saddle. Personified by the regal David Gulpilil, veteran Australian Aboriginal legend, playing an old-world tribal loner named King George, in touch with The Land and destiny in ways we “civilized” muckies cannot fathom.

Dr. Strange got nuthin’ on the Dreamtime!

And 12-year-old Brandon Walters as Nullah. In his first feature role, this young Aboriginal with the golden-black hair dominates the screen with confidence, frailty, innocence and empathy. The film is his – he stands as tall as Kidman and Jackman. He narrates from his perspective as the bastard son of a “white fella” and an Aboriginal, a half-caste the bigots call “creamy.” Nullah attaches himself to Lady Ashley after his mother dies; together with Drover, they form an informal family unit. (And Drover is not just a shallow white fella – his best mate is a “black fella” (David Ngoombujarra) and his deceased wife was that mate’s sister. The racist townsfolk consider Drover a black fella – which makes for a great excuse to start barroom brawls.)

AUSTRALIA marries the three disparate elements of Australia – the pompous city (Kidman), the rugged country (Jackman) and the beating blood of the land (Walters) – in one inadvertent family thrown together by range war and world war. It is heartening that Luhrmann and his co-writers (Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanagan) remembered that all these elements together shaped the Australia we know today.

Never has there been an Australian movie that gives such respect, acceptance and influence to Aborigines. Which makes this film an old-fashioned epic with new-fashioned values.

AUSTRALIA comes with two happy endings (not counting the scene where Hugh Jackman pours a bucket of water over his nude beefcake). Ending #1 finds Lady Ashley, Drover and Nullah settling on her hard-won property (after that dance in the rain), but instead of the credit roll which would seem fitting here, we get – WAR! And land baron King Carney (your average “twirling mustache” villain) is succeeded by his henchman, Fletcher (David Wenham), who is truly monstrous – the type who would gun down his own son for financial gain.

Stakes are ramped up as Fletcher almost destroys Lady Ashley, while sending his own illegitimate son, Nullah, to a boys’ home on Mission Island. Which the Japanese immediately bomb.

I promised myself I wouldn’t cum.

Whole third act is a tearjerker movie in itself, as everyone thinks everyone else is dead, leading to the inevitable “running tearfully towards each other with uplifting music” moment.

In a horrifying display of callousness, Fletcher tries to shoot Nullah, his own estranged son, until King George – a ubiquitous mystical presence throughout the movie – descends on him like a bird of prey. You will never again use the word “spearchucker” as derision.

Despite terribly inauthentic lighting, some iffy green-screen (worst offender is Nullah staring down stampeding CGI), and the mystical “I will sing you to me” moments involving Over the Rainbow, AUSTRALIA is a cry of elation for a southern desert land that was seemingly conquered by Hollywood with the DUNDEES, now reclaiming its mystery and majesty; a complex tale of three worlds in harmony, gleefully destroying Australian archetypes and shaping brave new ones.

Ending #2 is the bravura stroke, as Nullah goes a-Waltzing Matilda into the Australian bush with King George, on “walkabout” (Aboriginal transition to manhood). Luhrmann could have easily opted for a crass generic scene of two white lovers riding slomo into a red sun; rather, this movie is Nullah’s journey, Lady Ashley and Drover watching him fade into manhood, as a magic hour sunset burns into the sad horizon…

Think I’ll go start a barroom brawl at Outback Steakhouse.

END