Ray Pride

Most writers about movies cling to convenient myths. One is that marketers might mind a bad review now and again.

"Wolf Creek," aka "The Aussie Chainsaw Massacre," is less a movie than a mechanism, more a money-spinner than a moral offense. Calculated in its mix of Australian walkabout fables like Peter Weir's "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (1975) and the brutality pioneered by 1974's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," the début writing-directing-producing slasher effort by Greg McLean, "based on actual events," wrought a rare zero-star review from Roger Ebert on its cynical, mocking Christmas Day opening. Ebert asked, "What the hell is the purpose of this sadistic celebration of pain and cruelty?"

Um. Financial gain for the Dimension Films division of the upstart Weinstein Company? There's a wealth, or shall we say, poverty of youth-slaking horror product coming up, such as Eli Roth's Quentin Tarantino-hosted "Hostel" or the inexplicable Uwe Boll's "Bloodrayne," both opening next week, but "Wolf Creek" is another matter, with its mean, minimalist evocations of fear visited on a trio of young innocents captured by Outback yokels, shocks that cascade into explicit and sustained torture, for its characters and by extension, its audience. McLean, a director of commercials, is obviously a student of horror, from moments that are suggestive and many that are brutal, but does "Wolf Creek" stake out new territory or piss on new ground?

No. There is a cold fury at work in a movie like John McNaughton's "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" (1986) or a black comic sense of nightmare in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974). "Texas Chainsaw" was affectionately nicknamed "Saw" by director Tobe Hooper and writer Kim Henkel, which inspired a different, clammy horror series three decades later. Hooper and Henkel and company were onto something then that McLean is well aware of now: daylight can be as fearful as the dark.

But there is another kind of darkness here: The current issue of the politically oriented film quarterly Cineaste convenes a "critical symposium" on "international film criticism today," and Argentina's Quintin (aka Eduardo Antin), writes that movie criticism ought to contain "discovery, illumination, kindness, passion, freedom, elegance, humor, independence, knowledge, irreverence." Yes, as should the movies we see that we say you should see.

Yet as failed movie producer Peter Guber has repeated for decades, again and again, and always with great gusto, "It's not show show, it's show business." Some may find the landscapes of "Wolf Creek," based on the "Backpacker Murders" committed along an isolated stretch of highway between 1989 and 1992, and the film's canny use of off-screen portent a valid fright. Yet even with all the nastiness, there's more meta than meat here, especially with the cool calculation of unspooling a brutal provocation like this at a theater near you on Christmas Day after ham and pie and into the happy holidays that follow.

This surly, curdled, profitable mass of antisocial ambitions, an under $1 million-budgeted notebook of deeply disturbing misanthropy in the form of inventive misoygnies, is the first release of Dimension Pictures not under the Disney banner, but as part of the complexly financed independent, the Weinstein Company. In the money-spinning tradition of the "Scream"s and "Scary Movie"s and "Sin City," "Wolf Creek" continues the financially remunerative mix of horror and awards-friendly "quality" that made the original Miramax possible--junk and bunkum pay the freight for the prestige pics. (The most cynical way to look at it is that The Weinstein Company is the Classics division of a company called Dimension.)

Dimension's 2004 stocking snuffer was a re-edited version of a long-shelved Spanish horror title released as "Darkness," which snuck up onto multiplex marquees for a $6 million opening and a tasty final $22 million; "Wolf Creek"'s reported opening gross is $6.1 million. The Weinstein Company has more art-house-friendly entries like "The Matador," "Mrs. Henderson Presents," and "Transamerica," as well as the animated "Hoodwinked," all of which had 2005 release patterns at one point, but which were, for most of America, pushed into 2006 only in the past couple of weeks. Like their predecessor version of Miramax, this kind of calculation is part of the pattern: keep 'em jumping.

Post-Christmas also comes the report that Chen Kaige's newest epic, the $42-million "The Promise," after a record-breaking opening in China, is to be released by the Weinstein Company with an Anthony Minghella-penned "preface" appended and, it's rumored, to be cut by twenty minutes. The rivulets of money divined from feats of commerce like "Wolf Creek" make this possible, too.

"Wolf Creek" opened Christmas Day. Ho-ho-ho.

(2005-12-27)

Also by Ray Pride

All gone
"Munich" is about grief, vengeance, and questions about whether vengeance is appropriate and what remains on a man's conscience after taking a life
(2005-12-20)

Tip of the Week
Filmmaker Michael Almereyda's traipsing, months-long follow-along of photographer William Eggleston through New York and Los Angeles but also towns in Kentucky and Memphis, a man resistant to all manner of interpretation and fond of taking a single photograph of whatever he glimpses, is a worthy addition to the minor-key rococo of earlier efforts like "Another Girl, Another Planet," "Nadja" and the Ethan Hawke-starring "Hamlet"
(2005-12-20)

Holiday Movie Preview
Movies take a couple of hours to watch, but almost never less than several years to race from the scratch of a pen to the blank of an eye
(2005-12-13)

Raise the Red Kimono
I'm still confounded by the early reviews of "Memoirs of a Geisha" that suggest documentary-style "authenticity" is what we'd be getting from the director of "Chicago." Others have suggested that Sony ought to have sought out a Japanese director. Would a Japanese director have even wanted to dip a toe into this reflecting pool of Western ideas about the East?
(2005-12-13)

Tip of the Week
(2005-12-13)

What does it mean?
(2005-12-06)

Tip of the Week
(2005-12-06)

It's a blunder-filled life
(2005-11-29)

Tip of the Week
(2005-11-29)

Born to Rent
(2005-11-21)

Tip of the Week
(2005-11-21)

The one you're looking for
(2005-11-15)

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