At Home with John and Debbie

Anticipation has a habit to set you up for disappointment in evening entertainment but I expected quite a lot from Wolf Creek, having seen and heard good reviews among the stories of people walking out in disgust. Mark Kermode, a connoisseur of what he calls “grindhouse” horror, especially liked it, said it was “really nasty”, and used it as a springboard to explain his theories about how a good horror film is about masochism not sadism — so that’s all right then, eh?

Wolf Creek is an Australian version of the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” setup — tourists find themselves at the mercy of a psycho killer in the middle of nowhere. When Debbie rented it from Choices, the assistant told her it got particularly gory at the end. I think you can see why we were steeling ourselves for the ultimate in endurance horror.

And it is nasty. Don’t let me tell you it isn’t. As it slips into gear, it grabs you and it scares you. At the start there’s rather too much imbuing threat on completely innocuous scenes by applying creaky scary music, but that’s soon forgotten.

However, that anticipation let me down (I really should learn). At each fresh atrocity, I was thinking “ah yes, that’s nasty but the worst is yet to come”, so when the end came, I was still mentally preparing for the worst, which never came.

Does that make me a bad person? The main thing the film left me with was the fantastic Australian bush scenery, and the shots where the tourists’ car was all but lost in its spectacular surroundings. My overriding reaction was “we must drive through Australia one day” — meaning that at least in my case, the Australian tourist board’s worries about this film were unfounded.

The serial killer film that haunts me to this day (which means it’s good) is Man Bites Dog. Lots of film reviews nowadays like to take horror films involving CCTV or Reality TV and blather on about how the audience feels implicated. Man Bites Dog is the only film I’ve seen where I feel that’s true; and it’s thought provoking.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 5th, 2006 at 11:21 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.