Reviewed - Wolf creek: LIKE many of the best films in its grisly genre, this distastefully impressive Australian butchery show manages to introduce just enough original concepts - the archetypal Aussie good bloke as psychopath, a three-act structure whose middle section takes place off-camera - without coming over all respectable.
Greg McLean, a former opera director making his feature debut, does not allow his unquestionable talent to distract him from doing gratuitously unfair things to innocent people. Wolf Creek is clever, funky and witty, but, once the first youth is slain, it never stops being nasty.
Based very loosely on several true stories of murder in the Australian interior, the film follows three young people on their journey towards a picturesque meteor crater. A viewer who had failed to catch a glimpse of the poster could, for the first half-hour at least, take Wolf Creek for an experimental drama made by an acolyte of the Dogme movement. Using a nervy hand-held digital camera, McLean successfully imposes a documentary atmosphere on the action. As a result, the violence is all the more shocking when it arrives.
When their car breaks down, the gang are rescued by a bluff mechanic in a big hat. As keen on broad jokes as he is suspicious of effete Sydney folk, Mick Taylor - who, it hardly needs be said, later does bad things - is deliciously played by the veteran John Jarratt as a possessed version of Crocodile Dundee.
Neither the distinctly qualified welcome Mick extends to visitors nor the forbidding landscape around him does much to recommend McLean's homeland to visitors. The Australian tourist board will not be sponsoring screenings.
Playing as support to Wolf Creek, Brendan Muldowney's multi-award winning short The Ten Steps deals in a considerably less explicit school of horror. Telling the story of a young girl's eventful evening baby-sitting in a haunted house, the picture has a fabulously eerie punchline which should act as a delicate aperitif before the blood-rare meat of the main course.
