Wolf Creek (film)

Movie
German title	Wolf Creek
Original title	Wolf Creek
Country of production	Australia
original language	English
Publishing year	2005
length	Rated: 99 ; Unrated: 104 minutes
Age rating	FSK 18 ; FSK 16 (shortened)
Rod
Director	Greg McLean
script	Greg McLean
production	Greg McLean
music	François Tétaz
camera	Will Gibson
cut	Jason Ballantine
occupation
	John Jarratt : Mick (Michael) Taylor; Cassandra Magrath : Liz Hunter; Kestie Morassi : Kristy Earl; Nathan Phillips : Ben Mitchell; Guy O'Donnell: Car Salesman; Gordon Poole: Old man; Guy Petersen and Jenny Starvall: Swedish Tourists; Greg McLean: Cop;
chronology
	Successor → ; Wolf Creek 2

Wolf Creek is an Australian horror film from director Greg McLean from 2005 . The German premiere was on July 13, 2006.

action

According to the fade-in, the film is based on a true story. It can also be read: “30,000 are reported missing in Australia every year. 90% are found within a month. Some are never seen again. ”So roughly in German:“ 30,000 people are reported missing in Australia every year. 90% of them are found again within a month. Some will never be seen again. "

Three young people, the Australian Ben, who comes from Sydney, and the two English women Liz and Kristy, go on an excursion of several weeks in the Australian outback with little money . They will be adopted by their friends with a party beforehand. The small group then first drives by car to a meteorite crater called "Wolf Creek Crater". On the way there, they meet men in a pub who turn the two women on. Ben is making a short video at the gas station, filming himself. Without any special incidents, they drive on and visit the landscape. Ben and Liz have developed romantic feelings towards one another. When they want to drive further north to Darwin , their car does not start anymore. They also find that all the clocks have stopped. You get in the car and wait. In the meantime it has got dark when a man shows up with a tow truck, of which they are initially afraid. The man introduces himself as Mick and notices that the ignition coil is apparently broken. He offers them to drag their car to his camp and install the spare parts there free of charge - however, this camp is in the south, opposite the route the young people want. Finally they go with him. After the group has grown impatient because they have the feeling that they have been on the road for a long time, they arrive at an abandoned mine with a junkyard.

Mick seems friendly at first and tells the group about his previous job as a hunter. He gives the young people water to drink. But before the next morning, Liz wakes up tied up in a shed. She can break free, but she cannot discover the other two. She finds traces of blood on the extinguished campfire, where they fell asleep together that night, as well as the dismantled engine of her car. Liz follows her friend's screams, finds her tied up in another shed and has to watch how sadistic torture of the stranger begins. In the background, a mutilated and rotten woman's body hangs on the wall. Liz lures him outside with a fire, frees her friend, shoots Mick in the neck area with a rifle that he briefly disregards and is able to flee with Kristy. After a short time, Mick gets up again, slightly injured, and starts chasing them both. The two young women push Mick's car into a ravine together so that Mick can see the headlights go out and so that he cannot be found. However, you are then caught up by the sadist and have to hide.

Liz runs back to the mine and tries to get a new car because Mick has stolen the keys of the original escape vehicle. Here she finds references to several other people who were probably already in the clutches of the man. She discovers the video camera of a family who came to the mine the same way. She continues to find Ben's video camera and discovers Mick's car in the background in a short shot that Ben took at the gas station - an indication that Mick has been following her since then. Using keys stolen by Mick, she finally gets to a car, but is injured by Mick from the back seat. She can still drag herself out of the car, but Mick the defenseless cuts off several fingers, cuts through parts of her spinal cord and leaves her lifeless.

Kristy escaped from the ravine onto a road and is taken in by an old farmer. However, Mick shoots him in the eye with a sniper rifle from afar. She escapes with the farmer's car and is followed by Mick, who shoots a tire after successfully pushing him off the road. Kristy overturns her car, climbs out of the wrecked car and is shot dead.

The focus is on Ben, who is tied up and nailed to a wall in a building near the mine in the midst of decomposed, dismembered and hanging on the wall and is threatened by a fighting dog in a cage. He can pull his hands out of his nails and thereby his arms out of the bonds. He walks out into the countryside in great pain. A solar eclipse briefly darkens the area. Ben is found exhausted by two Swedish tourists and is flown by plane to a hospital in Kalbarri . He is arrested as a possible perpetrator.

Overlays indicate that Ben was released from pretrial detention after four months due to a lack of evidence and the fact that the murder sites and the corpses of the English friends were not found. Mick still lives unmolested somewhere in the outback of Australia. In a last shot, Mick walks towards the sunset with his rifle.

backgrounds

In reality, the film is not based on real events - it just fused some features of different Australian murders to create a single murderer who acts somewhat similarly in the film. Acts of the serial killer Bradley John Murdoch , with his murder of the backpacker Peter Falconio , and Ivan Milat served as models .
The meteorite crater is actually called " Wolfe Creek Crater " and is the second largest meteorite crater with debris in the world. It is located in the northwest of Australia. Although the film was shot in South Australia, the aerial view of the crater is from the actual crater.
The worldwide box office total was more than $ 27 million. In Australia, the country of production, it brought in around US $ 4.5 million, in Germany it was only US $ 722,000. Most of the revenue comes from the US with $ 16 million.
The German FSK 16 version (87 min.) Was shortened by almost 12 minutes compared to the KJ theatrical version (99 min.). The German KJ version is identical to the R-rated version. An unrated version was released on DVD in the USA, in which two additional scenes, which the director had cut out beforehand, and two scenes of violence can be seen slightly longer. The reason for this was probably the expected larger sales markets. Both scenes are included as cut scenes on the German DVD. These are the scene in bed at the beginning and the scene in which Liz finds a newspaper article at the mine.
Director Greg McLean makes a cameo as a police officer.
When Mick's car approaches in the dark, Ben quotes a scene from the movie Predator (“there's something out there” - “... and it ain't no human”)
When Ben and Mick are talking around the campfire, Ben quotes a scene from the movie Crocodile Dundee . ("That's not a knife, THAT is a knife")

Awards

The film was nominated 17 times for film awards in various categories and won two awards. At the Austin Fantastic Fest 2005, John Jarratt received the jury's award for Best Actor for Wolf Creek. In 2006, Will Gibson received the Award of Distinction from the Australian Cinematographers Society .

continuation

In October 2011, McLean announced that it would release a sequel to theaters in 2012 . John Jarratt continues his role as Mick Taylor. The Australian businessman Geoffrey Edelsten will finance the sequel and thus the largest private financial support for a film in Australia to date. Ultimately, the film was first shown in 2013 as Wolf Creek 2 and received a wider release in 2014.

In 2016, the Australian television series Wolf Creek appeared . In two seasons with six episodes each, John Jarratt embodied the serial killer Mick Taylor again.

E-book

In the summer of 2012, Sharp Agency published Return to Wolf Creek, an interactive book that takes place after the film, for the iPad .

criticism

“Commercially available slasher film in front of the backdrop of the Australian landscape, which is dramaturgically tired. At best, formally not without charm, because he knows how to skillfully create a suggestive mood of discomfort. "

- Lexicon of international film

“The disgusting scenes are only touched upon briefly, sensitive souls are nevertheless warned. The case that inspired the story was still on trial when the film opened in Australia. Exciting, violent and quite disturbing. "

- TV movie

“A first-class horror thriller: With 'Wolf Creek', director Greg Mclean has succeeded in creating an impressive flick which, due to the fact that the story is based on a compilation of real murder cases, conveys an oppressive atmosphere in the middle of the outback of Australia. So it is clear: The film is not for the faint of heart. With a low budget of just $ 1 million, Wolf Creek grossed over $ 16 million in the US alone. [...] Ultra-hard horror trip! "

- TV Movie

“The fact that 'Wolf Creek' skilfully rides the terror wave of the current horror film boom and comes closer to the panic survival shockers from the 70s than poppy perversion orgies like 'Saw' or 'Hostel' is due to the great effort to achieve realism. Using HD video and purely natural light sources, Greg McLean staged a terrifyingly authentic vacation trip to hell thanks to his formidable acting performances, at the end of which the evil hermit Mick, as the personification of the misanthropic wilderness, provides moments of shock that are difficult to digest. A remarkable directorial debut, which should be overlooked that the victims make some stupid wrong decisions for dramaturgical reasons. Conclusion: Nasty realistic hillbilly shocker made in Australia, which casts the viewer under its spell despite small dramaturgical annoyances. "

- cinema