Wolf Creek (2005)
A fairly standard slasher film, this one set in the Australian outback. Three early-20somethings (Liz, Kristie and Ben) are on a road trip and drive hours and hours into the middle of fucking nowhere to see the worlds largest crater and when they get back to the car it wont start.
They sit in the car as the sun goes down wondering what to do, and a truck approaches. A man (whatever the Australian version of a hick would be) wants to help them out, it can’t be fixed quickly and offers to tow them back to his garage where he can fix em up and get them back on the road.
Hours of being towed even further into nowhere and they arrive at his garage next to an old abandoned mine. The young folks and the Aussie sit around a fire and have awkward conversations for a bit while he drugs them, starts work on their car, and they all doze off.
When Liz wakes up she is ziptied up in a locked room and can hear Kristie screaming, their car has been stripped of all its vital parts. She then needs to quickly figure out how she is going to rescue Kristie and escape. Ben is nowhere to be found.
Now, this is really gruesome stuff. The kills and torture sequences are really unpleasant, and I’m no fan of the “torture film” as a genre. Thematically I would this is a bit of a combination of Deliverance and High Tension. I’m a seasoned gorehound and it made me squirm a bit. The bad guy Mick Taylor is a great villain. Greasy hair, loads of guns with an absolutely CLASSIC cliché mass-murderer lair with newspaper clippings and the belongings of his long gone victims.
I absolutely love a clichéd serial killer lair. When a character looks at all the pictures collaged together and think “OH MY GOD, THIS DUDE IS INSANE!” I’m not kidding, I giggle every time. Except in the Friday the 13th reboot, that was fucking stupid.
I would say this is a good example of not reinventing the wheel, but building a decent tire.
