ThiefHott Too much of everything

Greenes Please don't spend money on this.

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Gutsycurene Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Michael Daniels This movie is without doubt one of the great movies of all time and a mastery of Australian cinema It shows what that country is capable of when it really wants to go out and tell a story. And what a story to tell! This movie is a like a freight train hitting you in the face and having done so it then yet the compels you to jump on board and take a ride. This is one of those movies that just works on every level. The acting is superb, the script wild and unconstrained and the direction just "out there". In total this gives you an experience of what cinema really should be, bereft of CGI and special effects and crazy budgets it just rides along free as a bird. This movie makes up for all the so very many boring, dull lack-lustre cliche movies you have to sit though until you discover this gem. It's what film making is all about.

NateWatchesCoolMovies Wake In Fright is like one of those clammy nightmares where you are stuck in some godawful place full of ugliness and depravity, and try as you might, you simply can't escape or outrun the horror around you. Such is the plight of John (Gary Bond) a schoolteacher in a desolate county of the Australian outback, on his way to Sydney for a little R&R on winter break. His journey takes him to a pit stop in Bundanyabba, an assss backwards mining town in the middle of the middle of nowhere. He stops by the bar, where the leathery sheriff (Chips Rafferty) offers to buy him a beer. And another. And another. And another. You see, the Yabba is such an isolated doldrum of a place that it's inhabitants resort to extreme alcoholism on a daily and nightly basis, which combined with their sun baked brains leads to some harrowing displays of excessive and whacked out behaviour, that poor John comes face to face with. It's funny that his last name is Bond, because he has the air of sophistication akin to our dear old 007, and it clashes with these yowling yokels like baking soda and petrified vinegar. His composure starts to creak as each pint of lager cascades it's way down his esophagus, until the line between civilization and primal Instinct starts to scare him. But is it too late by then? He somewhat befriends Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence) a raging drunkard who hangs around with a group who do nothing but drink, howl like lunatics, fight and hunt kangaroos. Pleasence is transfixing as a once cultured man of medicine whose soul has been drenched in the endless consumption of beer and calcified by the mad, acrid sun, until the whites of his eyes begin to reveal the decay beneath. The scenes of alcohol drinking in this film are staggering, frequent and very, very disturbing. The loneliness has bred this behaviour and these people know nothing else but inebriation and idle time wasting, their lives reduced to one long episodic bout of day drinking and nocturnal revelry. John veers eerily close to falling directly in line with them and going to far down that path, especially during a nighttime kangaroo hunt that serves as some perverted form of an initiation ritual. I must warn you: not only are the hunting scenes very, very graphic, but they're completely un-staged. The adage "it's just a movie" doesn't apply to these sequences, and the carnage we see unfold is horrifying genuine. The hunts were supervised by the Australian government and conducted in an overpopulated area by experts. None of that makes them any easier to watch. This film serves as an anthropological treatise on what happens to human beings who live in the farthest and most remote corners of the world, left to their own devices by seclusion and time, relegated to near animalistic states that to them is just another day in the Yabba. Billed as a horror film, but the horror comes solely from the human elements, which to me is always far scarier. Deliverence ain't got nothing on this baby, and we're lucky we even got to see it at all. Some years after the film's bitterly received release (Australians were ticked at the depiction of their people, and probably stung deep by the truth of it) it disappeared so far into obscurity that all prints seemed to be gone, and the consensus was that it was lost forever. One day the editor was cleaning his garage on the very day he was going to liquidate everything he didn't need, and found a single print. This was nearly twenty years after the film's release, and today you can watch it on netflix Canada. Quite the story, quite the film. Just strap on a thick skin, it's a sweaty, dusty, boozy roller-coaster that dips to the very rock bottom of the human condition.

Woodyanders Smug and uptight British school teacher John Grant (a fine portrayal by Gary Bond) finds himself stranded in a hellish small town in the Australian outback that's populated by fiercely "friendly" drunken hooligans who eventually push Grant over the edge into madness, despair, and unhindered barbarism.Director Ted Kotcheff evokes a potently unsettling feeling of isolation and vulnerability from the remote rural region setting, maintains an unsparingly bleak tone throughout, and reveals the darker and more disturbing aspects of the rough'n'ready Aussie male character with jolting starkness and a masterful crafting of a gritty, yet surreal and nightmarish mood. The sharp and observant script by Evan Jones offers a bold and unflinching exploration of the dangers of "aggressive hospitality" and the startling extreme lengths hyper-masculine guys will go to in order to prove and assert a sense of virile potency over everything, with a chilling nocturnal kangaroo hunt rating as the definite shocking highlight. Donald Pleasance gives one of his best and most fearless performances as the educated, but slimy and depraved Doc Tyson, who assumes the role as a kind of insane fallen intellectual mentor to Grant as he descends right into the heart of human darkness. Moreover, there are bang-up contributions from Chips Rafferty as amiable constable Jock Crawford, Sylvia Kay as the forlorn and frustrated Janette Hynes, Jack Thompson as the rowdy Dick, Peter Whittle as the loutish Joe, Al Thomas as the jolly Tim, and John Meillon as affable bartender Charlie. Brian West's crisp picturesque cinematography vividly captures both the severe oppressive heat and suffocating backwoods hamlet atmosphere. A riveting and provocative stunner.

FlashCallahan John Grant is a bonded teacher who arrives in the rough outback mining town of Bundanyabba, planning only to stay overnight before catching the plane to Sydney. But after being greedy when he should have stopped gambling, his one night stretches to five, and he plunges toward his own self destruction. When the alcohol-induced mist lifts, the educated John Grant is no more. Instead there is a self-loathing man in a wasteland, looking at a rifle with one bullet left...Wake in Fright is the stuff that nightmares are made of. What happens to one person when they think that they can beat the house, and wanting to get out of their so called mundane life.Having your freedom and money to do it is a pipe dream to some of us, and John should have quit while he was ahead, he knew that something wasn't right about the place he was in, a film that makes you angry at the hero is doing something right, he should have just stayed in his room and smiled at the money, rather than let his 'bad side' tell him to go further.It's easily one of the finest Australian films ever made, but I'm unsure if it fits into the Ozsploitation banner that the films narrative is tinkering on. In this film, no one is friendly, everyone is sinister, even the ones who appear to be giving and friendly, Kotcheff gives the characters an air that they have some sort of ulterior motive, or hidden agenda.Pleasance is at his most disturbing here, and ironically the most harmless character here. But there are connotations of so e sort of abuse between Doc and John, and although you never see anything, it's insinuated.The Kangaroo scene is however one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen, and although it's stock footage of an actual hunt, the editing is superb, and the film just gets darker as the drunken nightmare progresses.This film should be used as a danger to alcohol, and if you watch closely, the alcohol starts off as looking refreshing and inviting, but soon the bottles and cans become more dirty, less inviting, and equal signs of trouble ahead.There is a little twist toward the end, but it's a wonderful psychedelic nightmare, you'll never want to be drunk in a strange place again.An essential movie, truly terrifying.