Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to of the 1%

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Claire Dunne One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

The Couchpotatoes Okay I must have missed something. I watched this movie purely based on the reviews it got, like "Best movie I ever saw" and so on... This movie is everything but the best movie I ever saw, it's garbage, and I really don't get how anybody could write a positive review about this. I give it two stars because there are actually even worse movies, but it came close to be in my absolute worse movies I ever saw list. There is almost no story, at least no interesting story. You can't even spoil the movie because there is nothing to say about it. The acting is sometimes terrible. All they do is drinking, gambling and talk nonsense. The worst part is the murdering of kangaroos, it's just awful to watch. I don't know why you would put that in a movie. Probably to shock people but in my mind you must be a sick person to like watching stuff like that. I thought it looked all real and I was right because in the end credits they openly it it was real footage of a kangaroo massacre. So to me the moviemakers are sick bastards and all the people that like this movie as well. Enjoy your cruel disgusting life.

NateWatchesCoolMovies 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.

FlashCallahan John Grant is a bonded teacher who arrives in the rough outback mining town of Bundanyabba, planning only to stay overnight before catching the plane to Sydney. But after being greedy when he should have stopped gambling, his one night stretches to five, and he plunges toward his own self destruction. When the alcohol-induced mist lifts, the educated John Grant is no more. Instead there is a self-loathing man in a wasteland, looking at a rifle with one bullet left...Wake in Fright is the stuff that nightmares are made of. What happens to one person when they think that they can beat the house, and wanting to get out of their so called mundane life.Having your freedom and money to do it is a pipe dream to some of us, and John should have quit while he was ahead, he knew that something wasn't right about the place he was in, a film that makes you angry at the hero is doing something right, he should have just stayed in his room and smiled at the money, rather than let his 'bad side' tell him to go further.It's easily one of the finest Australian films ever made, but I'm unsure if it fits into the Ozsploitation banner that the films narrative is tinkering on. In this film, no one is friendly, everyone is sinister, even the ones who appear to be giving and friendly, Kotcheff gives the characters an air that they have some sort of ulterior motive, or hidden agenda.Pleasance is at his most disturbing here, and ironically the most harmless character here. But there are connotations of so e sort of abuse between Doc and John, and although you never see anything, it's insinuated.The Kangaroo scene is however one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen, and although it's stock footage of an actual hunt, the editing is superb, and the film just gets darker as the drunken nightmare progresses.This film should be used as a danger to alcohol, and if you watch closely, the alcohol starts off as looking refreshing and inviting, but soon the bottles and cans become more dirty, less inviting, and equal signs of trouble ahead.There is a little twist toward the end, but it's a wonderful psychedelic nightmare, you'll never want to be drunk in a strange place again.An essential movie, truly terrifying.

yajji Wake in Fright is about a part of Australia that seems to have been clean forgotten. It is a snapshot of a history and life that was swept under a rug, largely due to the colonisation of the country. Very few Australians will be familiar with the Outback aside from a vague familiarity, nor will they be aware of the threateningly machismo life portrayed in Wake in Fright, but it is a life that does exist, far beyond the fringes of the city, in the hauntingly beautiful Outback. The narrative is based on a book of the same time, about a schoolteacher from the city who finds himself in rural Australia doing teaching work for money. During his stay, he ends up in a landlocked, isolated town in the barren Australian desert colloquially called the "Yabba". The primitive way of life here initially floors the well-to-do citizen, but the town and strips back his polished city exterior. The undoing of a polite, cultured gentleman at the hands of derelict desert folk is actually one of the most disturbing aspects of this film. I kept thinking that this man (John is his name) was going to fall victim to a horrible act of violence by the group of eccentric, predominantly wasted townspeople. But instead, the film takes a different route, a far more disturbing one, and places John at the centre of the depravity. He does not fall victim to their behaviour, rather he participates in it until it ravages him almost to the point of no return. The shred of credibility and decency that John has left sees him flee the town. He has had a taste of a more simplistic, animalistic, impulsive existence, but the city life has not allowed him to fully amalgamate himself within this recklessly masculine crowd.The film is masterfully well made. The scrumptious, beautiful colours and settings of the Outback are so rich and bare that they almost become surreal. Director Ted Kotcheff isn't the first person to see the Outback as a foreboding and menacing place, but he has probably helped solidified this view in one of the most memorable ways. The performances are all excellent and you wouldn't know Donald Pleasance is a British veteran actor, because he has got the role of a grubby small town man down to a tee. In fact, all of the actors who portrayed the inhabitants of the Yabba really do seem like they were plucked off the street, they have a naturalism that compliments the film and makes it all the more frightening. Brian West, the cinematographer, deserves much credit too. The heat of the Australian summer is so palpable and raw that it feels as though you are there, in those ramshackle pubs, with sweat from your forehead dripping into your beer (which is almost never empty thanks to the "hospitable" locals). It is such a visceral, often menacing and gut-wrenching experience.I highly recommend this film. It really is incomparable to anything I've ever seen. It isn't really a commonplace thriller, but rather a drama about a way of life that has been forgotten, in favour of a more polished existence. Australia is a fascinating country because it is home to both the city and the rural, timeless outback... very contradictory realities. But sometimes when these very alternate ways of existence meet, chaos ensues. The result is intoxicating.