Wake In Fright

With the bleached image of a man stranded in the outback with a rifle, the official poster for forgotten Australian 1971 classic Wake In Fright suggests a Wolf Creek or Deliverance type horror. While that couldn't be further from the truth, as the beautifully restored film stumbles through its beer-soaked two hours a different horror begins to take shape: is the dark heart of society? Are these the roots of masculine violence?

John Grant (Bond, doing his best Peter O'Toole) is a middleclass school teacher marooned in a one-classroom shack in the outback. He's better than this and knows it, which is why he's looking forward to Christmas holidays in Sydney. He arrives in the nearest town, 'The Yabba' where the town's policeman (Chips Rafferty) convinces him to go for a beer (or seven) and the inebriated John loses all his money in local gambling game. Stranded, he is at the mercy of the locals, who kindly offer him room and board but drag him from pub to shack and back again on a five-day bender. A drunken hunting trip into the bush to savage kangaroos snaps John out of his stupor, however, and he realises that he has to get away from this place...

Director Ted Kotcheff (who would go on to direct First Blood and Weekend At Bernie’s) serves up a series of juxtaposing images that regularly clash, just like John's uppity manner in this working class mining town. The boozy, frothy, beer-swigging scenes are almost immediately followed by shots of arid desert, and the dreamy slow pans of the opening scene beautifully match the sharp bloody cuts of the nightmarish hunting trip. That kangaroo slaughter, a sequence of disturbing and gory images of an actual hunt that disgusted the film crew gives the film its horror billing, but there are other quieter terrors here.

This is a white male-dominated world and with it comes the subjugation of women, who would be notable for their absence if not for Sylvia Kay, the daughter of one of John's inebriated hosts. She is a depressed slave, forced to clean up after her father and his friends' regular binges. John gentlemanly passes up the chance for a sexual encounter with her, only to later learn that she and Donald Pleasance's manic alcoholic doctor regularly indulges in the seediest of sex. There is no love or compassion to be found. Only alcohol. Drink up, mate. Have another.

It's only after the end credits that it's noticeable that a journey has taken place, that John is a changed man. His natural progression into degradation is all too believable and easy