WAKE IN FRIGHT is a fever dream of a movie from Australia circa 1971 and director Ted Kotcheff (FIRST BLOOD). It stars Bond… Gary Bond as a teacher leaving for Christmas break from a school he’s stuck teaching at out in the middle of nowhere in the outback. He hates it and is desperate to make it back to Sydney and see his surfer girlfriend. But it’s a long trip and while staying the night in a town called “The Yabba” he goes out for a drink. And it turns out to be a long fucking night. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Ted Kotcheff’
Wake in Fright (aka Outback)
Saturday, May 1st, 2010
LikeUncommon Valor
Monday, August 13th, 2007I don’t remember this one, but it was in a book about action movies I’m reading (Action Speaks Louder by Erich Lichtenfeld) and sounded pretty good. It’s one of those “Vietnam vets go back to rescue POWs” movies, but according to the book it’s the first one. And the weirdest part is that it’s from Ted Kotcheff, director of FIRST BLOOD, and made two years before George P. Cosmatos’s RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II. Maybe that’s why Kotcheff didn’t come back for part 2, he’d already done that movie.
Of course, the feel is pretty different from RAMBO. And there are three major differences in the type of story we’re dealing with here. Number one, it’s a team movie, it’s not focused on one dude. Number two, these are normal vets who have gone back to civilian life, they are not maniacs who have gone on a rampage and must get a pardon to go on the mission due to their skills with explosive tipped arrows. Number three, they are privately funded, they are not working for the government. In fact, the government is trying to stop them from doing it (you know how those fuckin bureaucrats are, with their red tape and what not. It makes you so mad BRING OUR BOYS HOME! etc.)
Not surprisingly, the movie is produced by John Milius (although if he worked on the script he was not credited). You probaly know who Milius is but if not here is a brief primer. He worked on an early unused script of DIRTY HARRY and later on MAGNUM FORCE. He wrote the famous USS Indianapolis speech in JAWS. He wrote APOCALYPSE NOW. He wrote and directed CONAN THE BARBARIAN. And RED DAWN. And John Goodman’s character in THE BIG LEBOWSKI is based on him. Except unlike that character he was not in Vietnam. He was never in the military, he’s just obsessed with it anyway. I wonder if he has flashbacks?
I’m pretty sure our politics are as opposite as oil and water, but I love the guy. He’s a great writer and there’s not alot of people who can write that macho. So his name was part of what got me to watch this movie. (more…)
First Blood
Saturday, January 1st, 2005Some video association recently named Sylvester Stallone “Action Star of the Millennium.” Well nobody knows where the fuck that’s coming from, mainly because there are about 999 years left on this millennium and about 900 on the previously millennium where nobody had figured out how to make action movies yet. But also there’s the sorry state of Sylvester Stallone’s career.
Now by that I do not mean that Entertainment Weekly shit that he is not making hits. There are many actors who are not making hits who are still completely respectable, such as our friend Mr. Eastwood. But Stallone is in the Arnold category, he’s done so much worse than making less money. His good days are so far behind him you almost don’t even associate him with them. First he turned Rambo into an icon and became the symbol of everything that is wrong with our country, our culture, our movies, and our clothes. (I mean that headband looked fuckin ridiculous.) Then he started makin shit like COBRA and DEMOLITION MAN and etc. etc. He fell so hard that even HE started noticing it after a while. So he went through a stage where he was fighting for critical respectability. He tried to go the Travolta route and lobbied for the role of Max Cherry in JACKIE BROWN. When that didn’t pan out he got fat for the role in COPLAND and america was under his spell until, you know, the movie came out. Soon he became so desperate he tried to revive both the Rocky and Rambo series, but luckily that hasn’t worked out yet.
I mean the dude is so easy to hate and laugh at now that you forget that he once was pretty decent. For cryin out loud he was in DEATH RACE 2000. The first Rocky was pretty good too and he Wrote it.
And the one thing I never had the chance to forget, because I never knew it, was that the character of Rambo was actually, at one time, a good character. I never saw FIRST BLOOD until recently and it’s pretty hard after all that came after to go back and admit it but, you know, this is actually a pretty fuckin good movie. (more…)
