Steineded
How sad is this?
Tayloriona
Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.
Portia Hilton
Blistering performances.
grantss
Three friends are touring around the outback of Western Australia when their car breaks down. A local, Mick Taylor, offers to help them and invites them back to his place. Little do they know that he is a psychopathic killer.Very intriguing and engaging. Certainly not your average slasher-horror-thriller, though the bar is set very low there. The tension is built gradually, with the bad guy taking a while to reveal himself. Doesn't borrow too heavily from horror clichés and the conclusion is never obvious.Great work by John Jarratt as Mick Taylor - very convincing and suitably menacing and superficially charming as the killer. Solid performances by Cassandra Magrath, Kestie Morassi and Nathan Phillips as the three tourists.
James Theodore Smith
I was anxious to see this movie because I had the uncut version. I was expecting gore, violence, a huge body count etc...There was none of the above. I think Mick killed two people in the whole film? It was slow- dragged throughout with nothing happening. I was at least expecting a climatic ending- nothing. Without the bad language this could have easily received a PG-13 rating, no sex, very little violence and gore. This film was more psychological than anything else. A complete waste of time. I noticed that part 2 is now on Netflix- I may give the sequel a chance. It can't be any worse than the first- Hopefully there will be some decent gore and a higher body count...and one last thing: Spoiler- When the dumb girl is in the car graveyard with about 12 cars she happens to pick and sit in the one car where Mick just happens to be waiting in the back seat: Is he psychic too...? and to just leave him on the ground with a flesh wound when she could have easily bashed his head in or kill him- no, she hits him in the back a few times. and based on actual events? What an insult to women.
meddlecore
I'll start off by saying that this film is genuinely f*cking terrifying.Everything begins, when a couple of female tourists and their Sydney dudebro guide, set off, on what seems like a relatively banal hiking adventure, into the Wolf Creek crater in the Australian Outback.It starts off slow...kind of like Bruno Dumont's Twenty-Nine Palms. And you start to expect it's going to play out like that (long, drawn out, banal drama- triggering your expectations and, thus, creating anxiety- followed by fleeting moments of the extremely shocking, if you aren't familiar with his model) too. But this is not how it plays out at all.It gets real shocking, real fast. And continues to be extremely shocking right up until the very end (so, for about an entire hour). Sadistic torture; vicious sexual assault; and a character that exudes a malevolent evil so twisted...that you would laugh...if you weren't so goddamn horrified throughout it all.You tend to question every decision they make; and yell at the screen every time you feel they squander a potential oppourtunity to escape. But you've got to give it to them...under the circumstances...they do a pretty damn good job at surviving...even if they do make every wrong f*cking decision.There is one survivor in the film- which is claimed to be an adaptation of actual events. But it's not really even a remotely accurate depiction of actual events, if you read the true story behind it.Either way, however...if you want to be scared. Watch this film.7.5 out of 10
SnoopyStyle
It's 1999 Western Australia. British tourists Liz Hunter and Kristy Earl are traveling with Australian friend Ben Mitchell. They party and get drunk. Ben buys a car and they drive to Wolf Creek Crater. After enjoying a hike, they return to find the car won't start. They are waken by the lights of Mick Taylor's truck. He tows their car back to his place. The group is drugged and taken prisoner by Taylor.This is another one of those torture kill horrors. Australia is good fertile grounds for making them over the years. This is just another one. There isn't anything new or anything terribly wrong. I don't find the characters that compelling. The trio is hot and young but so are many other actors. The two girls battling Mick Taylor has some fun moments. The problem is that the action fades. I love the finger chopping but long distance shooting doesn't hold the same appeal. The action and the intensity never reaches the same level of when they first discover their imprisonment.
