film | Maybe the dingo ate those ladies

That never-ending stream of PG-13 quote-unquote horror pap — The Fog, Boogeyman and Darkness Falls, I'm lookin' at you! — is probably to blame for WOLF CREEK, a decidedly R-rated response to the genre's typically ineffectual fare. Purportedly based on true events, it's so grim and gruesome that even those who appreciate the movie'll be hard-pressed to recommend it without attaching a disclaimer to their praise. On one hand, Wolf Creek is crisply fashioned, performed to the hilt, and pretty damn successful in developing an uneasy atmosphere of mounting dread. on the other, I'm not actively hoping to see anything like it ever again.

Blair Witch Project-style, this Sundance Film Festival competitor from down under follows three road-tripping friends — native nice-guy ben (Nathan Phillips), a surplus duder from Lords of Dogtown, and pretty British backpackers Liz (Cassandra Magrath), the sensible brunette, and Kristy (Kestie Morassi), the spunky blond — on a joyride through the starkly desolate Australian outback. When engine trouble — the most dependable scary-flick ingredient since Vincent Price — strands them quite literally in the middle of nowhere, help comes along in the form of a trucker named Mick (John Jarratt), whose amiably rough-and-tumble demeanor is straight outta Crocodile Dundee. His spare-time pursuits, however, are more remniscent of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which our protagonists learn the hard way after crashing at his garage for the night and waking up hog-tied and worse.

In this moment, Wolf Creek morphs from an eerily disquieting travelogue into an extended chase scene punctuated by frequent acts of harrowing violence, and your opinion of the film will depend entirely on how much of this transition you can stomach. It'd be much easier to dismiss the movie as repulsive trash if debut writer/director Greg McLean hadn't staged such an effective first 50 minutes that — thanks to the hand-held jitters of Will Gibson's you-are-there photography and the unaffected naturalness of Phillips, Magrath and Morassi's almost improvisational rapport — make you feel as though you're watching real people unwittingly coast down the highway to hell.

Then, as an appreciative thanks for caring, McLean repeatedly punches you in the balls for the duration of Wolf Creek's second half, when the narrative takes the form of a particularly sadistic pep-squad cheer (with Jarratt, convincingly scary, at the megaphone), and where he resorts to slasher-film clichés and logic holes (the killer lurking in the backseat of the car he couldn't possibly know the screaming victim would try to hide in; the incapacitated villain who, inexplicably, nobody offs) that all the bloodletting in the world won't fill. It's admittedly not hard to get sucked into Wolf Creek, but as the character-to-victim ratio evens out and the curious final images flicker on the screen, you might begin to wonder if the only point at work here belongs to the bowie knife that Mick uses to ... ugh. You know what? Never mind. C