Leave it to the Australians to produce the best of the recent homages to 1970s American horror films. Writer-director Greg McLean surpasses his peers with Wolf Creek, an unsettling minimalist film in the vein of early Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper, right down to its dubious claims of being based on a true story. Eschewing many tired conventions of recent Hollywood horror movies, McLean achieves his scares by actually depicting scary events, rather than just turning up the music or having people jump out from behind closed doors.
He doesn't dance around the gore, either, earning his R rating without resorting to pointless nudity or even much harsh language. Wolf Creek is a straightforward tale with familiar elements, following a group of three friends (Phillips, Morassi, Magrath) on a road trip across the Australian desert. They stop at Wolf Creek, a landmark famous for its huge meteorite crater, and this being a horror movie, their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. Soon a kindly stranger (Jarratt) arrives to help them out. This being a horror movie, what he really wants to do is torture and kill them.
The plot isn't exactly original, but the forbidding, almost alien locale (an actual giant crater) gives it a new twist, and McLean's execution is impeccable. His characters don't engage in annoying pop-culture banter or take their clothes off at the drop of a hat, and they aren't played by incompetent TV actors. They feel like real young people with real emotions, and their reactions to the extreme situations they find themselves in come off as genuine and not dictated by the horror-movie playbook.
It takes a little time for the story to rev up, but McLean uses that time to build a real sense of menace and foreboding, with the harsh landscape looming as a silent harbinger of bad things to come. He also introduces one of the most jovial serial killers in recent memory, another character who's not bogged down in horror clichés, thankfully free of the excessive quirks that most villains are saddled with these days.
Unlike so many of its slick counterparts, Wolf Creek is genuinely unnerving and sometimes upsetting; any film that can turn a Crocodile Dundee reference into a bone-chilling moment qualifies as a success. Wolf Creek may be simple, but sometimes simple is what works best.