fourfour: A strange ide'r of entertainment

Brutalcreek

The theaters are crowded right now with wonderful, thrilling, funny, warm-hearted, dramatic, artistic, inspiring, entertaining movies. If anyone you know says this is the one they want to see, my advice is: Don't know that person no more. - Roger Ebert on Wolf Creek, Dec. 23, 2005.

I am the sick fuck Ebert warns against. I am the the maniac with cinematic bloodlust, the boogeyman with popcorn on my lap and grease on my fingers, who wouldn't be seduced by any gorilla, child wizard or wardrobe this holiday season. Promised a realistic, unrelenting and brutal slasher, I let my horror geekdom get the best of me (I'm seriously a red-on-black silkscreened t-shirt away from a horror convention): I looked forward more to the low-budget Australian horror flick Wolf Creek than any other of this season's offerings. I saw it Christmas day.

I entered the theater defensive, having read Ebert's review (and, it's important to note that I think Ebert deserves to be America's most trusted film critic, and besides, he has my undying love for writing Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, even if he's now somehow above that film's sort of debauched revelry). Wolf Creek, in case you don't know (beware of spoilers, from now on), follows the story of three young Australians (two girls and a guy) who take a holiday to their nation's outskirts, become stranded when their car breaks down and find help via a creepy old guy who actually just wants to see them splattered against the wall. The film's tagline -- "The thrill is in the hunt" -- couldn't be more accurate: after about 50 minutes of uphill, character-building meandering, the film slams into fifth gear and stays there. The pay-off, however cynical, is that we get to watch the people we've just spent an hour with flail for their lives. Brought deeper into the wilderness by a pervy old guy who promises to fix their car, the three would-be heroes are thrust into an impossible environment. It's unfair, really -- they have no idea what it is to be prey, until it's too late. Their predator, meanwhile, is a seasoned hunter. They are bugs in a jar and the film effectively tears off each of their legs, one at a time.

Wolf Creek means business. While its unflinching brutality makes it another refreshing alternative to the PG-13, boo-did-I-scare-you? Japanese-remake bullshit that has hijacked the horror genre, it also hinders its watchability. "I'll cut your tits off," the killer says to one of the girls, after he assures her that he'll use a condom when he rapes her (it's for his protection, but his back-woodsy existence is clearly more prone to dirty genitalia, so maybe that's win-win and uplifting, after all). All the while, she's tied up in a garage full of what could be called his toys, without irony. I'm not so politically correct as to agree with Ebert that Wolf Creek is misogynistic -- the movie seems to hate everyone (including the audience) equally. [major spoiler]Yeah, the two women don't survive and the guy does, but that's no great triumph in an environment where the hunt greatly outweighs the kill[/major spoiler]. Ebert's assertion that the movie is sexist would seem to back Carol Clover's assertion in Men, Women and Chain Saws that the preponderance of female survirors in horror movies (what she calls the "final girl") is, in fact, feminist. That's probably too complex an interpretation for horror's tried-and-true cheapness -- sometimes a screaming, blood-soaked girl is just a screaming, blood-soaked girl.

But maybe I'm sick for feeling that way, and certainly, the defensiveness I felt when I walked into the theater gave way to a more introspective feeling as Wolf Creek's terror unfolded: what if Ebert was right? I generally tell myself that as a peaceful person, viewing horror movies provides some sort of catharsis. Maybe it's relief from the clash of social law and nature's -- it's not right to kill, but as animals, as intrinsic hunters, maybe we hang onto some of the DNA that would provide the impulse to do so. We're rightfully expected to rise above this capacity -- if horror movies somehow help out, great. But maybe sometimes bloodlust is just bloodlust.

Really, the gratuitousness of what I've witnessed onscreen goes beyond basic human curiosity that drives people to rubberneck at car accidents or even check out the morbid still shots offered at rotten.com and similar sites. After seeing Wolf Creek with Ebert's review in mind, it struck me that I've watched representations of such debased acts, that I'd probably be embarrassed to run through them all (though Lucio Fulci's eye-gouging tendency would, no doubt, hit high on that list). And all along, since second grade when I viewed and immediately fell in love with A Nightmare on Elm Street, what has allowed me to take all of this in, more or less unaffected or even absentmindedly, was a little voice on a loop saying: "It isn't real."

Yeah, I've seen some fucked-up shit, I've been taken aback and disgusted and nauseated in the name of entertainment, but it's this ability to detach (even if it's paradoxical and occurs at the same time as emotional investment in a given film) that makes me better than the guy in a trench coat that Ebert derides (and this isn't the first time he's been affected by not just the film that's up for review, but his perception of the audience's reaction -- he issued a similar condemnation 25 years ago for I Spit on Your Grave, right down to the geek-show analogy).

See, I know the location of the line that Ebert speaks in his Wolf Creek missive, and he's wrong: Wolf Creek doesn't cross it. Though it purports to be based on a true story (I think, actually, it's based on the fact that people often go missing in Australia, and, uh, that's about it), though its lens tends to gawk at the torture, Wolf Creek is unquestionable fiction. It's a long way from the porno approach to horror that something like 1980's Cannibal Holocaust takes, with its numerous and graphic instances of real animal slaughter (Lloyd Kaufman's apology-cum-review in Eaten Alive surmises that showing animals being ripped apart between staged scenes of human torture was an working example of Pudovkin's theory of montage -- basically, the fake deaths seem real by association). Certainly, Cannibal Holocaust and the films of the Italian cannibal micro-genre of the '70s and '80 are not meant to thrill, but to pummel. It's doubtful that many could get off to Wolf Creek's dirty talk. The extended scenes of rape in cannibal movies, however, have at least one champion. (Note: For more on Cannibal Holocaust, please do yourself a favor and read Eric Henderson's brilliant take on it. It's the best piece of grindhouse criticism I've ever read.)

Where does this leave me? Introspective, perhaps, surprised at myself, maybe, but ultimately, not far from where I've started. I'll be first in line Friday for the opening of Hostel, a film that promises to feature torture as its central theme. If nothing else, I can't wait to see Jay "the butt" Hernandez like this:

Jayballgag

Sick fuck? Yeah, that seems about right.

(Final note: For an essay similar in theme to the above post that goes at least one more to brilliantly tie critics' reactions to Wolf Creek to the critical response to Munich, check out Buzz's "On Terror" at CampBlood [published on the same day as this one, wouldn't 'cha know]. Terror is terror is terror is terror is fascinating, thanks to you, Buzz.)

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