"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Posts Tagged ‘John Jarratt’

Wolf Creek 2

Tuesday, July 1st, 2014

tn_wolfcreek2Man, I waited so long for WOLF CREEK 2 that I gave up on it happening like three different times. Back in 2005 director Greg Mclean said “You call that a debut? This is a debut!” with his deeply Australian outback slasher. It was kinda controversial at the time. I remember a Seattle Times critic walked out. Ebert was really offended by it. All my buddies except the two I saw it with said it sucked. It was labelled a new low in “torture porn” by non-horror fans who still review every new horror movie or worse, “nu-horror” by horror fans who hate most new horror movies. But I thought it was really well done, masterful tension and outstanding (sometimes darkly humorous) villain performance by John Jarrat (DARK AGE), very effective use of wide open nature as a source of terror, plus a little bit of precious George Miller blood pumping through the veins of the chase scenes. One over-explanatory scene and an abrupt ending couldn’t kill it for me.

Mclean’s followup was ROGUE, a really good giant croc movie somewhat buried in the U.S. when it came straight to video from Dimension Extreme. But then financing problems, the death of a close collaborator and who knows what else kept slowing down the return to the giant crater where a guy stalks people. So I’m happy to report that even with all that anticipation this is a very good sequel. It’s a smart escalation, more action packed, faster paced, cleverly structured. The only big repeated error is another “That’s it, huh?” ending. (read the rest of this shit…)

Wolf Creek

Saturday, December 31st, 2005

THIS REVIEW IS BASED ON ACTUAL EVENTS.

First off, I gotta address a couple points. Number one, regarding the reputation of this movie. I think it’s getting a bad rap. One Seattle critic wrote about walking out instead of reviewing it. Another one (“shout out” to Andrew Wright as the kids would say) mentioned the other critic walking out and said he didn’t blame her (his review was “a recommendation, I guess”). Roger Ebert gave WOLF CREEK zero stars and pretty much condemned it as a failure for the human race. Even some of the horror fans who liked it are talking about it like it peeled off their skin and made them eat it and despite the unpleasantness of the whole ordeal they begrudgingly had to admit that it did a good job of forcing them to eat it. (read the rest of this shit…)