Review by Tristan Bishop
In our digital, cloud storage age, it’s almost impossible to imagine films becoming ‘lost’ – as soon as they’ve been converted to a software format then they can be duplicated, shared and stored many times over at negligible cost. This wasn’t always the case of course – when your movie came as multiple cans of film, they took up actual physical space, whether in warehouses, film labs or the dungeons of dedicated collectors. And not only is physical space limited, but film is notoriously fragile – especially very old film. You may know the statistics already, but if you don’t, it is estimated that way over half of all films made before 1950 are lost. Shocking, isn’t it? Even more shocking is that 90% of American films made before 1929 no longer exist, beyond footnotes in dusty reference books and perhaps a few production stills. Thankfully there are people out there working tirelessly to track down missing films and restore them – a pause here to give thanks to Mike Vraney of Something Weird Video, a man who did arguably more than anyone else to locate, clean up and preserve literally thousands of long-lost exploitation films, and who sadly passed away a few weeks ago at the scarily young age of 56.
It’s not always obscure exploitation films that become lost, though – sometimes a high profile film would do badly at the box office and disappear, never being released on home video or DVD because it’s just not seen as commercially viable to do so, despite any perceived value the film itself might have. Wake In Fright (also known as Outback) fits firmly in this category. Directed by Ted Kotcheff (who later had his greatest success with Weekend At Bernies), it was adapted from a novel by Kenneth Cook (who later wrote the intriguingly-titled Killer Koala and Wombat Revenge) by a Jamaican-British screenwriter called Evan Jones (who also wrote the scripts for These Are The Damned and Modesty Blaise), Wake In Fright bombed at the box office on release, partially due to a critical savaging from Australian critics who perceived it as an attack on their way of life from a bunch of UK-based upstarts – possibly neglecting to mention that the novel was written by an Australian in the first place.
Critics were far kinder in the UK and France (in fact the film was premiered at Cannes and was nominated for a Palm D’or), but this did not translate into ticket sales. In any case, as it has a habit of doing, time worked its magic and eventually many of the top Australian directors started to sing the praises of the film and rightly pointed out that, whilst it was in no way definable as a success, it kick-started the Australian film boom of the 1970’s – leading to the now fashionable ‘ozploitation’ films. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, the film got lost. It was never released on home video, and all the theatrical prints of it had become too degraded to show. The film’s editor, Anthony Buckley, launched a campaign to track down a full copy of the film in 1994 – a search which spanned the globe and an entire decade before it was finally tracked down in Pittsburgh, and in 2009 the full, restored film was finally shown again in Australia, and now makes its way to the UK again with a cinema run and Blu-ray release from those lovely folks at Eureka.
The story is a pretty simple one – a young school teacher called John Grant (Gary Bond) is teaching in an isolated outback school, and is heading back to Sydney for Christmas. In order to get there he needs to travel to the town of Bundanyabba to catch a connecting flight. On arrival in Bundanyabba (affectionately known to the natives as ‘the Yabba’) he meets a friendly policeman (played by the enormous iconic Aussie actor Chips Rafferty, who died almost immediately after filming completed) who proceeds to first get him steaming drunk and then introduces him to the other local past-time, the game of ‘two-up’ – in a gambling den at the back of a cafe. Grant, seeing this simple game as a way to buy out his teaching contract which is keeping him in his isolated school, proceeds to lose all of his money. Luckily the locals seem friendly enough, and, whilst he misses his connecting flight, he finds himself adopted by them and drawn into their world. Unfortunately, whilst he initially is quite happy to get involved in the hunting, fighting and hard-drinking world, he soon discovers a more sinister side to proceedings, and perhaps a few truths about himself.
Wake In Fright isn’t really a horror film as such – the events and characters in the film are based in the real world, but it works as one. This is not to say that it paints the outback as an inhospitable place, or the locals as one-dimension villains – this is more of a fish-out-of-water tale, with the more refined and educated Grant viewed with suspicion by the residents of The Yabba, and finding himself thrown into situations in which he is not comfortable. The horrific centrepiece of the film concerns a kangaroo hunt on which Grant is taken. This sequence is long and contains a great deal of graphic footage of real animals being gunned down and stabbed, which will be extremely gruelling for most viewers (I found myself more and more sickened as these obviously intelligent creatures died horribly on camera). The film even comes with a pre-credits statement as to how the film-makers worked with the humane associations of Australia and the UK on this sequence, both of whom were apparently eager for the film to show the reality of kangaroo hunting which, at least at the time, was a nightly reality for many in the outback. We are meant to be utterly appalled at what we see, and it works – Grant’s misgivings at the hunt are few, and his willingness to be involved in the more violent aspects makes the film even more resonant.
The nastier aspects aside, the film is balanced, non-judgemental and even sympathetic towards its setting and characters – especially towards Doc Tydon, played by the late great Donald Pleasence, in one of his most eccentric roles (and fans of Donald will know this is really saying something) as an alcoholic doctor without a license who hides his disease (and his ‘aberrant’ sexual urges) in a town where downing your pint in seconds is considered polite. Tydon is really the key to the entire film, an outsider to all society who at first takes Grant under his wing and then eventually awakens (in fright!) repressed parts of Grant’s own personality. Without spoilering too much, the climax of the film is extremely well-handled – many reviews have read this a specific way but there appears to be a wonderful vagueness to the way this plays out that leads me to suspect certain events may not have happened at all, and Grant is responding to a fear of himself rather than to any real life trauma.
Wake In Fright is not an easy watch (although Pleasence is a sheer joy as ever), and has no easy answers , but I found myself replaying certain scenes in my mind for a couple of days afterwards, and any fan of challenging cinema, horror or not, would be advised to check it out.
Wake in Fright will be in selected cinemas in the UK & Eire nationwide from 7 March, before being released in a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack on 31st March 2014, from Eureka’s Masters of Cinema range.