If Wolf Creek had been released 25 years ago it would gained notoriety as a video nasty. The supposedly true story involves three moronic backpackers who drive into a remote part of Australia's Ouback in order to have a larf. Along the way they booze, toke, work out which one of the girls fancies the boy, and mouth corporate slogans like 'Just do it' and 'I'm lovin' it'. Everything is overexposed, it's choppily edited, and scored with jangly guitar music. So far, so like a mobile phone commercial.

Once they reach the bowels of the desert things start going Deliverance. While getting petrol they stumble into the scene from Easy Rider where the local rednecks abuse the soft folk from the city. Next, out in the middle of nowhere, their car won't start; it's raining, and the English backpacker birds wanna go hooome! Fortunately a nice Aussie stereotype rolls along in his all-terrain vehicle, and offers them a lift to his remote hideaway. He regales them with entertaining stories about the right way to kill various specimens of indigenous wildlife, and they try hard not to mock the quaintness of his conversational offerings.

Then it turns into a horror film: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, to be precise. To talk much about what follows would take away most of its punch, but suffice it to say it involves cable ties, hunting knives, grisly souvenirs, crucifixion, and unsolicited spinal surgery. Wolf Creek is a bloody, nasty film; it's also bloody nasty. Its grainy, sunscorched, colour-drained desertscape is obviously inspired by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and its plot, suggested gristle, and insular theme are lifted wholesale from the same source; all that's missing is the eponymous automated lumber device.

Wolf Creek will probably be written up as 'Crocodile Dundee from Hell', indeed it goes as far as to openly reference Paul Hogan's 'that's not a knife' line. But ultimately there is nothing intrisically Australian about it, even though Oz's answer to Leatherface does everything short of tying corks to his hat and singing 'Waltzing Matilda'. The film's central opposition is as old as the hills of Greece, and is found in cinema internationally: City vs country. It's there in every film mentioned so far, along with countless others ranging from City Slickers and Staw Dogs to The Honeymooners (the Karl Golden one, not the shit one): City folk are poofters who can't fight, use weapons, or find their way in the dark. But we know this already from the pungently Australian Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which manages to work without being humourless, bleak, and nihilistic.

There is a drab, mundane quality to Wolf Creek, and it's almost certainly deliberate. Greg McLean's film doesn't set out to provide comfortable shivers for the House of Wax crowd, instead it provides the inevitable antidote to the teeny fright flicks which have been flooding suburban multiplexes of late. Wolf Creek is horror à la Haneke: no masked boogeymen, just the many ordinary people who are only too happy to make life nasty, brutish, and short.

Rated 18 (see IFCO website for details)
Wolf Creek is released on 16th September 2005.
Wolf Creek – Official website