If you are just dying to see this film and don’t want to read any spoilers then you might not want to read on. However, since this film is summed up by its tagline I wouldn’t imagine there are many who can’t guess the story. In a nutshell it is the supposedly based-on-true-events tale of three young people; two English girls and an Australian guy (Teabag from Neighbours) who buy a beat-up car and set off on a roadtrip through the Australian outback. Along the way they stop at Wolf Creek meteor site but never get any further as their car breaks down and the man who comes to help them is actually a psycho with plans to torture and kill them.
There have been a couple of films in recent times that have once again pitched pretty, young city folk against perverse, gnarly, backwoods men (although for the most part these have been depicted as something less than human). The remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and particularly Wrong Turn are extremely close to this film, certain details being exact copies like the graveyard of broken down cars and the trophy rooms containing the belongings of previous city-slicker victims.
To be fair to this film though there are some differences. The main one being the setting; the backdrop here is the Australian outback, which means that instead of our bloodied heroes stumbling through forest, they are trying to escape over prickly wasteland. Instead of some log cabin in the woods, the torture scenes take place in an abandoned mining outpost.
The biggest difference, however, is the villain. My biggest problem with Wrong Turn was that the bad guys were so deformed and weird they were more like orcs crossed with muppets than the truly scary hillbillies of Deliverance. Here, the bad guy is a funny, friendly, gone-to-seed Crocodile Dundee. He poses as a helpful local finding the 3 young people by lucky chance when the car they have been travelling in breaks down. They are relieved to see him and allow him to tow them to his place but there is just the right edge of oddness about him, he stares too long at them, tells off-colour stories, makes threatening jokes before laughing them off. He’s properly creepy and for me this was the only true, clever scariness in the whole movie.
After this point the rest of the film is just unpleasant. I’m not a wimp when it comes to horror films but I hate the nasty stuff for nasty’s sake. I was squirming in my seat just wishing he’d hurry up and shoot these people and wondering why I had paid to watch it. Just like in Wrong Turn, there was no reason or motive for what this guy was doing and “he’s just a psycho” doesn’t cut it for me. There’s nothing clever about thinking up random gruesome things to do to characters and making your audience uncomfortable.
Add to this the stock stupid bimbo mistakes committed by an up-until-then sympathetic character and this film was lost to me. Please, if you’re taken captive by a madman and you get the upper hand, do NOT leave him lying unconscious with his rifle beside him while you go running off unarmed into the night. Also, if you are forced to return to the scene of his lair to procure an escape vehicle, do NOT get sidetracked by the interesting paraphernalia to the point that he has a chance to return and find some nice dark place to hide so that he can jump out and kill you when you’re done watching old holiday movies!
I have serious doubts about this movie’s “based on true events” claim…unless the events are that people have indeed gone missing in Australia. The one surviving witness spent most of the time down a mine shaft and never saw a thing. The bad guy went from nice but creepy to almost terminator invincibility; he just kept getting up and finding them, knowing exactly where the girls were going to be and able to position himself to get the jump on them even in the miles and miles of Australian countryside.
So all-in-all not a film I could recommend…particularly if this if the first time in about six months that you and your husband have managed to get to the cinema for a whole evening by yourselves.
10 replies on “Wolf Creek. Or “When Steve Irwin Attacks!””
Hello! Your article is very good! However I just wanted to say that it really is based on true events, and the person at the moment is on trial for murder.
none of it is true at all. it was pieced from inspiration from 3 different backpacker murders and has nothing to do with the details of any of them. 80% fiction.
Well, that’s a relief to know…it would be terrible to think that anyone could be as stupid as the two girls in this movie 😀
I watched wolf creek and it is a really good movie, and i dnt think that it is scary at all. but i do think that some of the stuff that they do is not true, and if that were me with the gun wen that girl was getting attacked, i would have killed him wen i had the chance. good one steve!! will miss him now that he has died
Hi Candi, I’m glad you liked the film…each to their own. I have to point out that this film had nothing to do with the late, great Steve Irwin. I was merely attempting to be witty with my post title.
It was a really nasty sadistic horrible film. Not like the pissed up fraternity boy joke ‘Hostel’. It was far too short though. I would’ve like to know the guys motives aswell.
i like the review, and im ust point out that this movie was “based” actual events of Ivan Milat back packer murder cases in australia. this was an actual case as for the content of the movie was fictional, it still stands that ivan millat tortured and killed back packers in australia in the wolf creek area. look it up on the net.
an interesting movie with some great moviemaking twists. I don’t know about you, but I had no idea who was going to survive and who would die, which is a change from the “he’s such a jerk you know he’s going to die” or the always classic “disagree with the protagonist about survival strategy.” I found the cinematography very fresh (I don’t know if that’s because it’s an Australian flick, or even if it IS an Australian flick). I agree with the reviewer that the best part was seeing a friendly but socially awkward stranger turn into supervillian, however as for the “gore for its own sake” I disagree; increased blood and gore is a strong trend that affects virtually all horror movies these days. Compare Wolf Creek to, say, 30 Days of Night, the Saw series, Hostel, The Hills Have Eyes, or a plethora of others, and Wolf Creek looks like a Disney flick. What I kept hoping the director would do is overlap the three stories chronologically more; show a weird event from one of the characters perspective, like the psycho running to his truck and driving off in pursuit of another car, then later explaining the event in another plotline.. make the entire plot happen in a compressed time (but then, I’m a big Christopher Nolan fan). As for the reviewer opinion that the “no motive” doesn’t satisfy, I agree, but as the killer boyfriend in Scream says, “it’s a lot scarier when there’s no motive.”
Hi htedro, I agree with you, this film did have some nice twists on the formulas of horror, the villain in particular was a departure, at the outset anyway, from your run of the mill boogey men. Since seeing this one I’ve had the displeasure of watching ome of the others you list and I have to say that you’re right about this trend. Those others you mentioned (particularly The HIlls Have Eyes and Hostel) do indeed make Wolf Creek look like a deep and meaningful character study. However, I have to stand by my opinion that the second half of the film was relentless and nasty…my memory of it is that I just wanted him to get it over with and kill them already so I didn’t have to watch it anymore. I like your suggestion of a compressed storyline, that would have given me something to think about rather than just battering me over the head with torture scenes.
I thought this was a great film, (except for where she leaves him for dead…). I think what I liked was that it is the sort of film that leaves you thinking about it the next day, and trying to work out how you would have escaped in the same circumstances…