I'm sure by now you've heard of this movie. I think it's safe for me to review it now that the craze and hype and backlash against the movie is mostly over and my review won't be lumped in with all the fawning reviews that pretended that "Wolf Creek" was something new and that "Wolf Creek" was flawless and all that other rot. I don't pretend any of those things. I saw the movie and immediately pegged it as neo-grindhouse and thus knew what I was getting into. I knew there would be stupid scenes that insulted my intelligence and pissed me off and I knew there would be enough extreme violence to make it worth my while and I knew that the violence would be gritty and realistic enough to make me cringe. The movie delivered on every count and I can honestly say that to this day, I love it for what it is, not for what it was hyped up to be. This movie caused quite a stir when it was first released, as you can imagine. It's a tale of three friends (or rather two friends and a random guy they picked up along the way) on a road trip across the Australian outback heading home. It takes literally an hour for anything ominous to happen and when it does, it's pretty poorly done. I don't think it's spoiling anything to tell you that while the friends are sightseeing their car breaks down and their watches all stop and they think something supernatural is going on.

We've gotten to know the three main characters for an hour and so we care about them and when they decide it's a good idea to let a strange man tow their car 3923903490243902 miles away from civilization we want to scream at them not to go. Of course they don't listen to us and soon they're cut off from the rest of the world trapped on this man's property and very bad things start to happen. When I first heard about 'Wolf Creek" I thought it might be a werewolf movie. Allow me to spoil something again. It's not. It's purely psycho killer mayhem, and the torture scenes are well done, at least from my estimation. The look a little too real for comfort. Someone is nailed to a cross, someone is hung by her wrists and slashed with a knife while she screams and her captor calls her a cunt, someone's spine is severed, leaving her alive and aware but completely paralyzed, someone is shot in the head, someone else is shot in the back and then in the head. It's all very mean spirited and nasty just like I would expect from a good little grindhouse baby, and these scenes bothered me in all the right ways and thus the movie impressed me for having the balls to go all the way with the violence and not care about plot conventions or letting people live just because the audience was rooting for the characters.

I can also see why someone would be so disturbed by this movie that they freak out. The killer isn't caught at the end, and the killings themselves are so methodical and cruel and violent and nasty that Roger Ebert famously panned the film and said that if someone you know wants to see this movie his advice was "don't know that person no more." In fact, one of my friends who is pretty suggestible and delicate wanted to watch this movie and I told her not to because I knew it would really mess her up, and she ignored my advice and watched it, and then she stopped talking to me for a month because she said she needed time away from me and my "horror movie obsession." Bitch listened to Ebert.

This movie doesn't hold back, and while it doesn't have a whole lot more to offer other than grueling torture scenes, I say, so fucking what? So what if I LIKE watching torture scenes when they're done well? I know it's not for everyone and that's fine, but where did this stigma come from that there's something wrong with me because I have different tastes? I understand differing opinions but if a movie is so sickening to watch that it can split up friendships... wow, that's pretty cool, isn't it? I mean, that shows what power the movie has, what power the scenes have, and even though I wish the filmmakers had used that power to make the REST of the movie as intriguing and worth watching as the torture scenes, hey, I'm glad I got to see something that powerful firsthand. I recommend you watch it, but don't go in blind, know what you're in for, know the bad and the good, and then see if it intrigues you as much as it does me.