A so-called classic film about brutality between males in the Australian outback. No real plot or story. Slice of life of guys who are only partially civilized.
From Other Reviewers:
1. Awe-inspiring, brutal and stunning, Wake in Fright is the story of John Grant, a teacher on Christmas break who arrives in the rough outback mining town of Bundanyabba, planning to stay overnight before catching the plane to Sydney. But, as his one night stretches to five, he plunges headlong toward his own destruction. When he meets some alcoholic misfits, the educated John Grant is no more. Instead he turn into a self-loathing man in a desolate wasteland, dirty, red-eyed, sitting against a tree and looking at a rifle with one bullet left. Th e movie was believed yo lost for many years, Wake in Fright has been painstakingly restored by Australia's National Film and Sound Archive and AtLab Deluxe, and is presented in its original uncompromising form.
According to Australian critics, the film was originally reviled because it painted such a horrifying portrait of life in the isolation of the Outback — life making our own Old West look positively civilized. "Deliverance," made a year later in 1972, is mild by comparison.
2. "Wake in Fright" is a film made in Australia in 1971 and almost lost forever. It's not dated. It is powerful, genuinely shocking and rather amazing. It comes billed as a "horror film" and contains a great deal of horror, but all of the horror is human and brutally realistic.
Screened at the Toronto Film Festival in 2009, picked up three years later by Drafthouse, it arrives still powerful and crushing. It has what would have been an all-star cast when it was released, and still is now for those who know their actors: Donald Pleasence, Jack Thompson and Gary Bond.
The story involves a young schoolteacher in the middle of the desolate wilderness of the Outback. The opening overhead shot shows a shabby building beside a railroad track, the camera pans 360 degrees and finds only the distant horizon, and then returns to find a second building on the other side of the tracks. One building is the school. The other is the hotel. To get to either, people must have to travel a great distance.
It is the end of the school year. The teacher (Gary Bond) takes the train to a town where he plans to get a flight to Sydney. He loses his money gambling and is swept up in the vortex of a group of hard-drinking, hard-living, crude, vicious men. His "vacation" descends into drunkenness, brutality, rape and a gruesome moonlight hunt where they massacre kangaroos.
Kotcheff's film is raw and uncompromised, well-acted, brilliantly photographed and edited. Animals were certainly "harmed." Footage of an actual kangaroo hunt was seamlessly edited in by Buckley, and a "producer's note" says this documentary footage was included with "the participation" of animal rights' organizations, whatever that means. It's rare to find a film that goes for broke and says to hell with the consequences.
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