Cubussoli
Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!
Myron Clemons
A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.
Ezmae Chang
This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
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 admit 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.
Fella_shibby
I first saw this in 2010 on a DVD. That time i was on a horror movie spree. I came across this title after watching Wolf creek. As a fan of movies based in Outbacks n Badlands n thinking of it being an outback horror i was excited bah this flick. Recently revisited this on a blu ray. The film is based on a 1961 novel of the same name by Kenneth Cook. Well, its not a true horror film but it is genuinely shocking, funny n weird at times. The movie is about a schoolteacher, who is not happy teaching in the middle of the desolate wilderness of the Outback. The opening scene shows beside a railroad track, jus two buildings,a school n a hotel. Both of em in the middle of nowhere. The cinematography is gorgeous, completely sun-soaked (i felt like just wearing a vest like the majority of the characters coz of the heat). The film feels claustrophobic and suffocating, even though the Outback is wide open. It is the end of the school year. The teacher is planning to head to Sydney for his vacation to meet his girlfriend. He lands in a town called The Yabba, an outback town populated by aggressively friendly weirdoes. The town is full of working-class population, primarily white males, outnumbering females, who all are happy drinking their beer in its own exclusive heat-haze bubble of dust and sand, sealed off from the rest of Australian civilisation by endless miles of desert outback emptiness. The teacher loses his money gambling in a weird game and constantly bumps into hard-drinking, hard-living, crude, vicious men. He descends into drunkenness, brutality, rape and a gruesome moonlight hunt where they massacre kangaroos (possibly the most disturbing five minutes). It's hard to watch, but only because it demonstrates the realistic results of human nature. We hav Donald Pleasance playin a doc once again. He is the backbone of this film, a true weirdo. Awesome acting.
Rollum
The first time I saw this film was on daytime TV around 1975. I was absolutely blown away then. The movie vanished, presumed lost for decades. Then it was tracked down and saved by the film's editor, Anthony Buckley, in Pittsburgh where it had been marked for destruction. I have watched it several times recently and it has the same effect on me. Wake in Fright is mesmerising and disturbing.What's it about? On the surface it's about school teacher John Grant (Gary Bond) paying his tuition fees off by teaching in the isolated outback of Australia. He wants out. He doesn't want to be there, doesn't understand the people, and doesn't understand the culture. It's the holidays so John sets off for Sydney and makes a stopover in a town called Yabba. In a game of two up, John nearly wins enough to pay out his tuition fees and go back to Sydney. Nearly. There is a sense of impending disaster and John is vulnerable and distressed. You really feel the fear and confusion. This isolated community have little distraction from themselves, its hot, it's oppressively hot. Drinking beer is part of the culture, ingrained in every ritual, rituals that are tragic, disturbing, ignorant, juvenile, unlawful, cruel, stupid and perverse, normal for everyone except John. Our school teacher stumbles and crashes through each encounter, it should be easier for an educated man but he can't understand it, can't really come to terms with any of it. Will it break him, or will it kill him? You will have to go through it with him and find out.
poe426
When one-room schoolteacher John Grant (Gary Bond) ends up in the dusty little one-horse town of "Yabba," he finds himself down and all but out: drunkenly gambling away what little money he has, he finds himself wandering from place to place in search of sustenance (which consists mostly of beer, which he guzzles with great gusto throughout the movie). (An odd habit, that: alcohol dehydrates you, yet everyone in this town guzzles it like it's going out of style.) Grant wakes after one drinking binge to find himself in the shack of "Doc Tyden" (Donald Pleasence). "I'm a doctor of medicine," he tells Grant: "And a tramp by temperament." Along with a pair of Doc's drinking buddies, he and Grant go on a late night shooting spree. Their prey: kangaroos. In what's easily one of the most disturbing animal-killing sequences in any movie ever made, we see the 'roos actually being shot on camera. A "disclaimer" of sorts at the end of the movie tells us that the slaughter was handled "by licensed professionals." I can't help but equate THAT one with the abrogations of Nazi soldiers: "We were just following orders." Grant gets so caught up in the bloodletting that he cuts the throat of a 'roo (a one-eyed 'roo, at that) before winding up back in the cabin with Doc- who proceeds to sexually assault him. Heads or tails, WAKE IN FRIGHT is a disturbing but must-see piece of filmmaking.
