PATRICK (1978)

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THE LAST WAVE

Peter Weir, 1977

Starring: Richard Chamberlain, Olivia Hamnett, David Gulpilil

David Burton, a lawyer, agrees to defend a group of city-living Aborigines in Sydney when they are convicted of murdering one of their friends. They explain that they didn’t kill him; he just died. That obviously won’t hold up in court, so David explores further and is disturbed by the fact that one of the Aborigines, Chris, appeared in David’s dreams before they met. Chris and one of his friends, a shaman named Charlie, begin to intrude on David’s domestic life. He begins having stranger and stranger dreams about water and menacing other worlds. He thinks that Chris and the group of Aborigines are part of a secret tribe and the death of their friend was part of tribal law. This defense doesn’t hold up in the city, but David continues to learn more about Aboriginal life and the Dreamtime, a separate world that overlaps with civilization. He comes to believe that signs from the Dreamtime indicate the impending apocalypse.

Also known as Black Rain, Peter Weir’s follow up to his masterpiece, Picnic at Hanging Rock, is another triumphant exploration of terror and dread in Australia. As with Picnic at Hanging Rock, this isn’t really a horror film. Both movies are immersed in dread, concerned with the horror of nature, and have more than a touch of the supernatural. And as with Weir’s former film, the ending may not satisfy viewers used to tidier, more linear filmmaking. The conclusion is ambiguous and the “last wave” that Burton pictures is not a literal sign of the apocalypse, but a figurative one; a symbol of the terror that comes from civilized humanity’s interactions with what it does not know and cannot understand.

There’s some great acting, particularly from David Gulpilil (who has been in everything from Walkabout to Crocodile Dundee) as Chris and Nanjiwarra Amagula as Charlie. I’ve always found Aboriginal culture fascinating and Weir clearly did too during the making of this film. There aren’t an abundance of ‘70s Australian films where Aborigines play central roles, so this is something of a rare treat. Amagula did not act in anything else; he was an Aboriginal clean leader and agreed to help Weir with the film. Apparently numerous changes were made to the script at his request, particularly in terms of the portrayal of Aborigines. He understandably refused to allow Weir to use real tribal symbols, but added an air of veracity, as well as disturbing mystery to the film. He’s truly one of the most fascinating Australian personalities ever captured on film.

The somewhat milquetoast Richard Chamberlain (The Thorn Birds) is enough of a mediocre, unthreatening personality to be truly effective as David. Though somewhat dull at first, his character is fascinating. In some ways, David is as far removed from conventional Australian society as the Aborigines are, due to his constant, unsettling dreams. There is a link between water, dreams, and the Aboriginal concept of the Dreamtime, something David is able to access through no conscious desire of his own. His connection with these forces pushes him further from family, career, and society, and closer toward the Dreaming. This also heightens the film’s sense of dread, suspense, and the uncanny, bringing the film to its inexorable, inexplicable conclusion.

The film opens with a scene of school children playing, but then they are terrified by a sudden, inexplicably hailstorm. These moments of a violent, unpredictable natural world, usually linked to water in some way, increase as the film continues. Flash storms, rain, dreams of water, and finally, a massive wave, tie society, Sydney, and David’s family life into this other world of intuition, inspiration, and chaos.

Moody, disorienting, and frustrating in a more visceral, less dreamy way than Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave is another triumph for talented director Peter Weir. In addition to Russell Boyd's eerie cinematography, and an effective use of mood and atmosphere, The Last Wave is another must-see Australian film that brushes up against the horror genre, but winds up being so much more.

The film comes highly recommended. As with Picnic at Hanging Rock, there’s a great Criterion release of the film, which is excellent. While I would say Picnic at Hanging Rock is somewhat a better film, The Last Wave is more intimate, personal, and oddly more real. It’s the story of a man’s interaction with his landscape, as if seeing it for the first time, and his rational understanding that there will always be things hovering somewhere out there on the edge, the wild, the untamable, the destructive.  

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK

Peter Weir, 1975

Starring: Rachel Roberts, Dominic Guard, Helen Morse, Jacki Weaver

On St. Valentine’s Day in 1900, a group of teenage girls from a private school in Victoria, Australia, go on a picnic to Hanging Rock, an ancient and ominous geological formation. Sara, one of the students, is prevented from going by the headmistress, Mrs. Appleyard. She must stay behind for an afternoon of punishment for some unspoken crime. Some of the girls, Miranda, Irma, Marion, and Edith, decide to go for a walk and climb up in the rocks. The chubby, whining Edith complains and must eventually lie down, while the other three girls climb higher and higher. Miss McCraw, one of their teachers, eventually goes to look for them, though no one notices her absence.

Hours later, the group returns to the school, but Miranda, Irma, Marion, and Miss McCraw are missing. Edith is quite ill, having returned to the camp site in hysterics and covered in scratches. Local policemen organize a hunt, which includes a young English boy, Michael, who saw Miranda and, thinking her beautiful, tried to follow the girls. No one is found, the Edith admits she saw Miss McCraw walking into the rocks without her skirt on. Determined to find Miranda, Michael wanders into the rocks and nearly dies. His friend Albert rescues him and also finds the unconscious body of Irma, who is alive, but very ill. Her corset is missing, but she has no memory of what happened.

Parents begin removing their daughters from the school and Irma is nearly attacked by the other students. Meanwhile, Sara’s punishments continue. After a young teacher, Miss Lumley, finds Sara tied to a wall, she gives her resignation notice. Mrs. Appleyard, meanwhile, has become more odd and disheveled. The next day, she tells Sara that she must return to the orphanage, because her school bill was never paid. Sara’s body is soon found. Though a suicide is assumed, Mrs. Appleyard is acting suspiciously. At the closing credits, it is revealed that the girls were never found and Mrs. Appleyard’s body was soon located at the base of Hanging Rock.

Based on the novel of the same name by Joan Lindsay, this haunting, illusive Australian classic is not quite a mystery and not really a horror films, but its themes of repressed sexuality and the menacing, almost alien quality of the Outback are disturbing and deeply impacting. Where another famous Australian film from that period, Wake in Fright, is concerned with a descent into hell, Picnic at Hanging Rock is about a journey into the void, an exploration of absence, nothingness. It is a mystery film that is obsessed with the mystery, not its solution, and a horror film that displays its horrors by implying, though never directly showing them.

One of the most terrifying elements of Picnic at Hanging Rock is the unspoken relationship between Mrs. Appleyard and Sara. At first glance, this is merely a headmistress disciplining a rebellious student, but it takes a particularly nasty turn with implications of sexual obsession at best and at worst, abuse. Sarah is isolated from the other students, manipulated, told she is going back to the orphanage (where she has a very real history of abuse at the hands of other adults), and tied up. As her ill-treatment continues, Mrs. Appleyard becomes increasingly disheveled and disoriented. Sara’s death is intentionally vague, though it’s fairly obvious that Mrs. Appleyard has knowledge of it: she lies to another teacher about Sara’s whereabouts, saying she has already left with her guardian, and is wearing mourning clothes before she hears the news of Sara’s death.

Making a film (or writing a novel) about a mystery that can never be solved is a difficult venture and probably frustrated a fair number of viewers, but director Peter Weir did an excellent job with Picnic at Hanging Rock. This central issue of the missing girls reminded me of a number of other works – Antonioni’s L’Avventura being the most obvious candidate for comparison, but also J.M. Barry’s play Mary Rose (which Hitchcock was so desperate to adapt), and oddly Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Virgin Suicides. Though we know what happened to the girls in Virgin Suicides – they all commit suicide – we never find out why. Picnic at Hanging Rock is also similar to E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India, which is equally concerned with sexual repression, a hostile natural landscape, and unexplained events. This hostility, particularly in terms of the Australian Outback, is also explored in Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout.

There’s some incredible, haunting cinematography from Weir’s regular collaborator Russell Boyd and a near-perfect score including pan-pipe compositions from Gheorghe Zamfir and dreamy, melancholic classical pieces from Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and others. Acclaimed director Peter Weir is also known for The Cars That Ate Paris, The Last Wave, Galipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously, and more commercial films like The Dead Poet’s Society, The Truman Show, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. This is a masterpiece among many fine films and it is an absolute must-see.

Criterion released a lovely, director’s cut DVD of Picnic at Hanging Rock, and I believe they plan to re-release it on Blu-ray in June of this year. Again, Picnic at Hanging Rock comes with the highest possible recommendation. This enigmatic film may be too slow or mysterious for some, but is one of the most magical exercises in filmmaking from the ‘70s. 

WAKE IN FRIGHT

Ted Kotcheff, 1971

Starring: Gary Bond, Donald Pleasence, Chips Rafferty, Sylvia Kay

A school teacher, John Grant, hates his small-town job and is traveling across Australia during a holiday to visit his girlfriend in Sydney. He takes a train to a mining town known as the Yabba to catch a flight, but gets held up in Yabba when the locals encourage him to constantly drink himself into inebriation. At first, John has fun and appreciates the local hospitality. But soon he discovers gambling and though he nearly wins enough money to stop teaching, he loses it all, including everything he came with. He is trapped in the Yabba and must rely on the kindness of strangers, namely the local doctor, Tydon. Part of the hospitality includes forcing him to drink insane amounts of beer, encouraging him to have sex with a local woman (he vomits instead), and dragging him to the Outback in the middle of the night for a brutal, bloody kangaroo hunt that he is expected to participate in. John’s trip plunges into various forms of violent, rape, and a permanent hang over. Will he escape the Yabba, or will he have to kill himself?

While Wake in Fright is generally regarded as a horror film, it is not as much a straightforward genre flick as it is a disturbing descent into hell, the heart of darkness, psychological horror that feels horribly real. Amazingly, I first saw the film as a bootleg (actually shown to me by an Australian) just before its revival, which could not have come too soon. Based on Kenneth Cook’s novel Outback, Wake in Fright was considered lost for several decades before its 2009 resurgence, where a print was allegedly rescued minutes before being sent into an incinerator.

The film disappeared due to poor performance at the Australian box office, despite a great reception around the world and at Cannes. It was allowed to screen at Cannes again after its 2009 revival, and is allegedly only the second film to receive to two separate screenings at the legendary festival. I think part of the initial problem with Wake in Fright is that it straddles the link between art-house (like Walkabout) and Ozploitation/horror (such as the arguably great Long Weekend and Razorback). As with its main character, the film exists in an uncomfortable no man’s land. Though it has since become a cult classic and received rave reviews, there was simply no way to position it within ‘70s genre cinema or the types of films being made in Australia at that time.

Similar to films like Deliverance or Straw Dogs, but more brutal, more real, and more vulnerable, Wake in Fright comes highly recommended, but it is not the sort of film you should let catch you unaware. Be forewarned that there is extensive, very real animal violence, as part of the film follows John on a midnight kangaroo hunt. This was shot with professional kangaroo hunters and was allegedly so gory and disgusting that the film crew faked electrical problems in order to stop filming. But in addition to these brief moments of violence, it is incredibly bleak. The perfect date movie, in other words.

Wake in Fright benefits from solid acting all around, thanks to a number of Australian side actors and lead performances from the great Donald Pleasence and Gary Bond (Zulu, Anne of a Thousand Days), looking somewhat like Peter O’Toole here. Pleasence’s Tydon is both charismatic and repulsive – at heart he is a rational man, a doctor who made the conscious choice to move to the Yabba, because the local populace is willing to overlook his alcoholism. Though John becomes stuck in the Yabba due to a downward spiral of violence and alcoholism, he is first drawn there because of the decisions he makes – he drinks and gambles away all his money. It is his inherent politeness and civility that prevent him from refusing the local citizens when they take pity on him and show him some charity.

The women in the film are practically nonexistent – this is a man’s world and it is primarily concerned with depictions of masculinity, as with many of director Ted Kotcheff’s films. John’s girlfriend is little more than a faded photograph, a mirage, while Janette is passed around from man to man in Yabba and Tydon talks about her as an idealized sort of woman, rather than as a specific person.

Director Ted Kotcheff (First Blood, Weekend at Bernie’s), does a phenomenal job and everything from the soundscape to the cinematography are near perfect. While this is regarded as one of the greatest Australian films of all time (by the likes of Nick Cave, no less), keep in mind that its director is Canadian, its two leads are British, and it was co-funded by the U.S. It is a brutal picture of humanity, regardless of its origins.

The restored film is available on Blu-ray in a special edition release that comes highly recommended. Brace yourself for some Australian punishment and check out one of the greatest Australian films, thankfully rescued from oblivion. If you want to learn more about the film, check out Twitch’s interview with Ted Kotcheff or this page from the Alama Drafthouse, who helped release Wake in Fright for its 40^th anniversary. 

RAZORBACK

Russel Mulcahy, 1984

Starring: Gregory Harrison, Arkie Whiteley, Bill Kerr, Judy Morris

"There's something about blasting the shit out a razorback that brightens up my whole day."

Where the other famous homicidal pig film, Daddy’s Deadly Darling, disappointed all my expectations, Razorback more than lived up to them. An old man, Jake Cullen, is framed for the murder of his grandson by an enormous boar, also known as a razorback. Cullen is released because of lack of evidence, and becomes obsessed with killing boars of all shapes and sizes. 

Several years later, an American animal rights activist and reporter, Beth, travels to Australia to document brutal kangaroo hunting. The locals dislike her presence and two of the more unpredictable members of the town, Benny and Dicko, run her car off the road late at night and attempt to rape her, but are scared off by a giant boar, who kills her. Her husband, Carl, comes to Australia to learn more about her death, even though he is told it was an accident. He meets Benny and Dicko, who take him hunting during the night and leave him for dead. Cullen and another local, Sarah, a scientist, help him discover what happened to Beth. When he learns the truth, he is determined to get revenge. 

I could say that Razorback is the finest killer boar film ever made, but that’s not saying much. It is easily one of the best and most beautiful animal attack films and comes highly, highly recommended. Helmed by director Russell Mulcahy (Highlander and about a million music videos) and written by Australian screenwriter Everett De Roche (who, among many other things, wrote the equally serious, but slightly less effective Lost Weekend) and based on a novel by Peter Brennan, Razorback is essentially an outback riff on Jaws with a giant, terrifying boar instead of a shark. 

I can’t believe that a movie about a killer razorback could be so beautiful, but it is, particularly lighting and framing. Mulcahy and his cinematographer Dean Semler (Road Warrior) do a fantastic job. I’ve never been to Australia, but in parts of Razorback it looks like Mars. Some of the film could be likened to Mad Max, particularly the characters of Benny and Dicko, but Razorback stands on its own (four hoofed) legs. There is enough action, violence and just a scant amount of gore to keep the film moving at a brisk place. Cast members occasionally die unexpectedly, which is a nice touch. There are a lot of great performances, particularly from Bill Kerr as Cullen, and we don’t spend enough time with any one character to get tired of them. 

As with Lost Weekend, there is great tension and pacing, and some truly terrifying animal sound effects late at night. There are also some fun, nonsensical moments, like Carl’s delirious dream sequence, which is both effective and silly. And don’t forget the Australian cowboy in the beginning of the film who strolls past riding a camel, with a boombox strapped to its saddle, giving a new and wonderful meaning to the term ghettoblaster. 

Though I loved it, I will admit that there are some flaws. The visuals certainly overshadow other elements of the film. Though the boar is effective - and apparently cost a quarter of a million dollars to make - it isn’t used often enough. But those shots toward the end are worth every penny and were designed by Bob McCarron (Dead Alive, Beyond Thunderdome, etc). The plot is divided and feels contrived, particularly when it comes to the gargantuan boar, who appears when he is needed to move the script along. Really none of the characters are developed, but this is a movie about a killer boar, so I have to admit that I barely noticed any of that. 

Immediately track down Razorback if you want a thrilling, fact paced animals attack film. Warner released a basic version on DVD-R as part of their Warner Archive Collection, but you really want the Australian edition, full of special features. That is also included an a nice Ozploitation box set with Long Weekend, Stone and a few others. Maybe this will encourage you to get off your ass and buy a multi-region DVD player.