Better than “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”!

Movies coming out of Australia continue to impress me. Having seen this I am going to have to go back and find a copy of “ICQ”, and earlier work by the same director. (Greg McLean)

The story is based on actual events, “based” meaning not mirroring them exactly, of course. The narrative is quite believable, with a tremendous amount of realism, and that makes it all the more frightening.

A trio of young vacationing hikers has some car trouble while deep in the outback and a local bushman offers them a tow back to his place and fix their car. It turns out that in local lingo “give you a tow” and “fix you car” may mean something horribly different than what the trio thought. Like maybe their code for really terrible things that you’d pretty much have to see to believe, and that director Greg McLean doesn’t have any problem showing us in full color.  

With a relatively small cast “Wolf Creek” doesn’t try to be a huge production, it just tells its story and tells it well.

While none of the cast members are superstars, they are all experienced professional actors with impressive resumes and as expected they do an excellent job in a way that emphasizes the story without being distracting. I suppose this is one of the benefits of indie films, aside form the absence of clichés there is also an absence of typecast actors whose very faces make you think of other movies.

The special effects are adequate and them some. I found them horrifyingly realistic looking.

All in all I’d say it’s got to be the best horror film of 2005, bar none.