It serves up a platter of gratuitous gore that could feed an army of slasher-film lovers.
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"Wolf Creek"—a film that cost only a million dollars to make—grossed 4.8 million its first weekend, which was good enough for 14th place on the profit charts. You knew it would, and the same thing that made people go to the theaters will make them rush to rent the Unrated Version: the prospect of seeing more gore. Five more minutes than in the theatrical release.
30,000 people are reported missing in Australia every year. 90 percent are found within a month. Some are never seen again.
"Wolf Creek" advertises itself as being based on true events, inspired by Australia's Backpack Killer who, in the '90s, murdered seven hitchhikers carrying backpacks. Frankly, I'm not sure why anyone would want to advertise that a murder movie was based on a true story, because it really puts the pressure on to create suspense on the order of Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." And that's not easy to pull off. When we know the outcome, we can't wait for "Wolf Creek" to get moving and get on the road. The entire first half seems pointlessly slow, because it doesn't deliver any information about the characters that would make us care about them more or understand why they're backpacking to Wolf Creek National Park to see the world's largest meteor crater—other than the fact that the crater is there, and so are they. All we see is an MTV-style collage of these twenty-somethings partying in Broome before they head into the Outback. Wooooooo! Character development? What's that? First-act tension? Likewise.
Then again, if writer-director Greg McLean really knew how to build tension prior to the bloody shenanigans that drive this film, I'm not so sure that he would have wasted 11 minutes on a pre-title sequence that sends all sorts of mixed tonal messages. At times, he goes for tension via harsh-angle in-your-face close-ups and a hand-held camera that moves here, there, and everywhere. But those attempts are artificial and don't provoke as much as a mild concern for these folks. Since we're not really given any significant details about the two female British backpackers—Liz Hunter (Cassandra Magrath) and Kristy Earl (Kestie Morassi), or their new Australian buddy, Ben Mitchell (Nathan Phillips)—nothing they do prior to their encounter with the Backpack Killer really matters.
There's but one episode that foreshadows the direction this film is going to take, and it happens when the trio, en route to the park in Ben's beater of a car, stops at a truck-stop style outpost at Emu Creek. There, some locals ogle the gals and say to Ben, "Would you mind if we had a gangbang with your girls?"
That's basically the level of treatment that women receive in this bloody film, in which there are no real thrills and few real scares—only the horror of one human sadistically torturing and sexually abusing others. Yes, people like Jeffrey Dahmer exist. But if McLean decided to do a film about that monster next, we'd endure 45 minutes of inane footage of the victims going about their business in Milwaukee, and then watch for another 45 minutes as Dahmer slowly killed his victims, had sex with their bodies, dismembered them, and ate them. Far too much footage is shot of gruesome torture and humiliation, with far too few scenes dealing with attempts to avoid or escape this fellow. And those were some of the few moments in "Wolf Creek" which were suspenseful and not just a sick celebration of misogynistic mutilation.
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[release]18512[/release]