Wolf Creek

At the beginning of this grisly horror flick, a sort of Down Under version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, we're told that thousands of people have gone missing in Australia over the years. Wolf Creek tells the tale of three of them—an Aussie surf bum and two vacationing English girls—who are picked up by a gregarious trucker after their car breaks down in the Outback and soon find themselves the hapless captives of a sadistic madman, who tortures them mercilessly with the intention of killing them when his bloodlust is satiated. The picture is basically a red-drenched cat-and-mouse affair, an old-fashioned horror movie that eschews the tongue-in-cheek, self-referential attitude popularized by the Scream franchise and aims, quite successfully, to be the sort of humorless gore-fest that once prevailed. And viewed simply as an exercise in technique, it's very efficiently done, with the gloomy, gritty look the genre demands: the victims suffer extravagantly, and run—always scared, stumbling, and panting—convincingly, and the perpetrator appears to be relishing his avocation without being turned into a wisecracking boogeyman. But the graphic depictions of mindless cruelty here are more revolting than scary, and the suffering fails to evoke much compassion, since the characters aren't drawn beyond the flimsiest of sketches. Optional. (F. Swietek)