Grumpy is jetting off on Monday, to treat Petulant to a birthday treat in Istanbul, and we managed to get some time to ourselves last night for the first time in a long while. Kicking off with a spot of shopping (I missed the second part of the weather report which said that it was going to be sunny and cold, and had to buy an autumn jacket – a very nice beige suede waist-length number; Grumpy had to further spoil Petulant with presents), we then went on to Bodeans to indulge my occassional and irrepressible desire for ribs, and thence to Leicester Square, for a good old multiplex experience.
It has been a while since I saw a film which made me scared. The last time I remember experiencing that utter paralysis at something I had just viewed was when (nolonger)Drunk and I were still a couple, a year and a half ago, and we watched ‘The 100 scariest movie moments of all time’, and sometime before we even reached the number one spot ‘Here’s Johnny!’, I was begging him to accompany me to the toilet as I could not envisage going half way up the stairs by myself… The original version of ‘The Ring’? Good, classy, brooding. Didn’t make me catch my breath. Recently ‘The Grudge’, the Americanised version, gave me a couple of sleepless moments. The last film I saw which really caught my imagination in this way was ‘Jeepers Creepers’, and that must have been four or five years ago now. And the second half of the film was so laughable that by the time you left the cinema the atmosphere built up so expertly in the initial driving scenes is completely dissipated.
So I was looking forward to ‘Wolf Creek’, hoping that finally something would disturb my imagination and invade my dreams at night. And, to make short work of my response, it did not disappoint. At the end of it (despite a few moments of genuine flinching), Grumpy affected an insouciance and proclaimed that he liked his horrors more psychological, and by that I took him to mean more stylised, brooding, intense. In the way that all Hollywood thrillers have become. I couldn’t disagree more. To me, Wolf Creek is a movie which puts the viewer in the picture, allows us to imagine we could be there and that could be happening to us. And the where and the what are painted so expertly that we really don’t want to be thinking like that.
It follows three young backpackers – two English girls and an Australian boy – on their road trip to see a crater formed by a meteorite hitting the earth. The opening scenes of the film are lengthy and naturalistic – we get a feel for the every day nature of what’s happening, and the observations, down to the girls both clearly wanting to take a crack at the boy, Ben, but affecting not to care, are painted in a straightforward way. Everything is there for the viewer to observe; nothing – unlike the American equivalents, and like the vast outback which they are travelling – is signposted. When they climb down from the crater, they observe that the two watches which they carry between them both stopped at the same time. When they get in their car, it fails to start. These are the only two supernatural elements to the film (apart from Ben’s obsession with talking about UFO sightings), another marked difference from so many of those Hollywood blockbusters, and again, something which makes us able to suspend our disbelief to the extent that we can envisage ourselves in the scenes to follow.
I won’t say what these are. If you have read any of the reviews, you will know that the group encounter their very own version of ‘Crocodile Dundee’ who offers to fix their car, takes them from this isolated place further and further into the outback, in a journey that takes hours and sees our travellers getting increasingly restless and concerned. You will know that he turns out to be not so much a Paul Hogan character as an amalgam of outback serial killers, most notably Ivan Milat, whose remarkable history I have been reading about today.
I recommended to Bloke and Blonde that they go and watch this film. I wouldn’t tell them what happened next either. But I would recommend that you don’t do as Grumpy and I did, and go for ribs first.