Wake in Fright (2012)

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Ye Gods, what a strange film. If you haven't yet seen this film (as I hadn't until a few days ago), seek it out and make a date. Truly disturbing, it tells the story **SPOILERS FROM HERE** of John Grant, a teacher at a small village school who decides to visit his girlfriend in Sydney. On the way, he stops off for one night (he thinks) in 'the Yabba' a town inhabited by some rather over-friendly people who force alcohol on him and virtually control his life. They are his 'mates' whether he likes it or not. As he has lost every cent in the local gambling den, he has no way out and nowhere to stay except at the homes of these hard-drinking troglodytes, and in a short time he is just as bad as any of them and spends his days in an alcoholic haze. Is there any end to this hell on Earth? I suppose this film sets out to show how our sheen of civilization hides our inner self under the surface, and how little it takes to corrupt us, especially when we can see no way out. A truly awful but brilliant film. Get yours today.

Wake In Fright is like one of those clammy nightmares where you are stuck in some godawful place full of ugliness and depravity, and try as you might, you simply can't escape or outrun the horror around you. Such is the plight of John (Gary Bond) a schoolteacher in a desolate county of the Australian outback, on his way to Sydney for a little R&R on winter break. His journey takes him to a pit stop in Bundanyabba, an assss backwards mining town in the middle of the middle of nowhere. He stops by the bar, where the leathery sheriff (Chips Rafferty) offers to buy him a beer. And another. And another. And another. You see, the Yabba is such an isolated doldrum of a place that it's inhabitants resort to extreme alcoholism on a daily and nightly basis, which combined with their sun baked brains leads to some harrowing displays of excessive and whacked out behaviour, that poor John comes face to face with. It's funny that his last name is Bond, because he has the air of sophistication akin to our dear old 007, and it clashes with these yowling yokels like baking soda and petrified vinegar. His composure starts to creak as each pint of lager cascades it's way down his esophagus, until the line between civilization and primal Instinct starts to scare him. But is it too late by then? He somewhat befriends Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence) a raging drunkard who hangs around with a group who do nothing but drink, howl like lunatics, fight and hunt kangaroos. Pleasence is transfixing as a once cultured man of medicine whose soul has been drenched in the endless consumption of beer and calcified by the mad, acrid sun, until the whites of his eyes begin to reveal the decay beneath. The scenes of alcohol drinking in this film are staggering, frequent and very, very disturbing. The loneliness has bred this behaviour and these people know nothing else but inebriation and idle time wasting, their lives reduced to one long episodic bout of day drinking and nocturnal revelry. John veers eerily close to falling directly in line with them and going to far down that path, especially during a nighttime kangaroo hunt that serves as some perverted form of an initiation ritual. I must warn you: not only are the hunting scenes very, very graphic, but they're completely un-staged. The adage "it's just a movie" doesn't apply to these sequences, and the carnage we see unfold is horrifying genuine. The hunts were supervised by the Australian government and conducted in an overpopulated area by experts. None of that makes them any easier to watch. This film serves as an anthropological treatise on what happens to human beings who live in the farthest and most remote corners of the world, left to their own devices by seclusion and time, relegated to near animalistic states that to them is just another day in the Yabba. Billed as a horror film, but the horror comes solely from the human elements, which to me is always far scarier. Deliverence ain't got nothing on this baby, and we're lucky we even got to see it at all. Some years after the film's bitterly received release (Australians were ticked at the depiction of their people, and probably stung deep by the truth of it) it disappeared so far into obscurity that all prints seemed to be gone, and the consensus was that it was lost forever. One day the editor was cleaning his garage on the very day he was going to liquidate everything he didn't need, and found a single print. This was nearly twenty years after the film's release, and today you can watch it on netflix Canada. Quite the story, quite the film. Just strap on a thick skin, it's a sweaty, dusty, boozy roller-coaster that dips to the very rock bottom of the human condition.

The first time I saw this film was on daytime TV around 1975. I was absolutely blown away then. The movie vanished, presumed lost for decades. Then it was tracked down and saved by the film's editor, Anthony Buckley, in Pittsburgh where it had been marked for destruction. I have watched it several times recently and it has the same effect on me. Wake in Fright is mesmerising and disturbing.What's it about? On the surface it's about school teacher John Grant (Gary Bond) paying his tuition fees off by teaching in the isolated outback of Australia. He wants out. He doesn't want to be there, doesn't understand the people, and doesn't understand the culture. It's the holidays so John sets off for Sydney and makes a stopover in a town called Yabba. In a game of two up, John nearly wins enough to pay out his tuition fees and go back to Sydney. Nearly. There is a sense of impending disaster and John is vulnerable and distressed. You really feel the fear and confusion. This isolated community have little distraction from themselves, its hot, it's oppressively hot. Drinking beer is part of the culture, ingrained in every ritual, rituals that are tragic, disturbing, ignorant, juvenile, unlawful, cruel, stupid and perverse, normal for everyone except John. Our school teacher stumbles and crashes through each encounter, it should be easier for an educated man but he can't understand it, can't really come to terms with any of it. Will it break him, or will it kill him? You will have to go through it with him and find out.

When one-room schoolteacher John Grant (Gary Bond) ends up in the dusty little one-horse town of "Yabba," he finds himself down and all but out: drunkenly gambling away what little money he has, he finds himself wandering from place to place in search of sustenance (which consists mostly of beer, which he guzzles with great gusto throughout the movie). (An odd habit, that: alcohol dehydrates you, yet everyone in this town guzzles it like it's going out of style.) Grant wakes after one drinking binge to find himself in the shack of "Doc Tyden" (Donald Pleasence). "I'm a doctor of medicine," he tells Grant: "And a tramp by temperament." Along with a pair of Doc's drinking buddies, he and Grant go on a late night shooting spree. Their prey: kangaroos. In what's easily one of the most disturbing animal-killing sequences in any movie ever made, we see the 'roos actually being shot on camera. A "disclaimer" of sorts at the end of the movie tells us that the slaughter was handled "by licensed professionals." I can't help but equate THAT one with the abrogations of Nazi soldiers: "We were just following orders." Grant gets so caught up in the bloodletting that he cuts the throat of a 'roo (a one-eyed 'roo, at that) before winding up back in the cabin with Doc- who proceeds to sexually assault him. Heads or tails, WAKE IN FRIGHT is a disturbing but must-see piece of filmmaking.