Wake in Fright

Nick Cave called this ferocious, blackly comic Outback nightmare “the best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence”. Lost and almost forgotten since its 1971 nomination for Cannes’ Palme D’Or, as a film of innately Australian fear and loathing it compares well with Wolf Creek. But this tale of a smug English teacher having his civilised skin torn off him in strips during an endless week in a purgatorial mining town is less of a pure “Oz-ploitation” film than that.

Though unhinged and buffeted by savage psychological currents, it's also precisely calibrated by Canadian director Ted Kotcheff (best-known for the original Rambo film, First Blood). It’s the sort of raw, dripping, carnivorous celluloid you very rarely have the luck to see. Watching it is like finding yourself trapped on a barstool in a seething pub in a strange town, and being transfixed by the outlandish, dangerous company around you. Which is a feeling its unfortunate hero comes to know very well.

John Grant (Gary Bond) is the teacher stuck in a flyspeck Outback town, with all his money bonded to the government to stop him doing a runner. En route to Sydney, he dreams of surf, civilisation, and his bikini-clad girlfriend. But he has reckoned without the town he stops in on the way to the airport, and his own secreted urges.

The Yabba is a dust-coated mining town whose citizens survive by their own rules. They are uber-Australians: they work, drink, fight, and value their mates. The first beer forced on Grant by the local sheriff (Australian icon Chips Rafferty in his last role) leads to rivers more, downed in one. The packed cacophony of the shed of a pub, the sweat and the constantly necked, falsely cooling pints becomes intoxicating and feverish. A deceptively simple gambling game tempts Grant to bet his bond, to clear it and escape, but instead he finds himself cleaned out. He wakes with nothing left but a hangover, bitter regret, and the Yabba.

No one here is bothered Grant only has a dollar to his name. Everyone keeps insisting on standing him a round. He falls in with the alcoholic “Doc” (Donald Pleasance, pictured above right, mixing wildness and assessing intelligence, as the film does), and young, dangerously hot-blooded larrikins (including a second Australian icon, Jack Thompson in his first major film). They end up on a brutal, night-time kangaroo hunt, pictured left with Gary Bond, for which Kotcheff used footage of a real one. This long, unremitting scene of blood and meat looks like a genocide. And even then, Grant hasn’t hit bottom.

Flash-cuts encourage the feeling of a blackout-plagued, delirious, fracturing mind. But this isn’t the Straw Dogs sort of horror film you keep expecting it to become, where the town turns on the civilised outsider. Everyone Grant meets starts by treating him like a mate. Everyone just wants to have a drink with him. He’s just an Englishman who doesn’t know how to act, driven crazy by alien kindness. That’s why this isn’t just one of the most viciously truthful and gruelling films about Australia. It’s also one of the funniest. Have a drink, mate?

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Wake in Fright