Ten Days of Terror!: Rogue

Film: Rogue
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Jaws was a far more seminal movie than anyone thought at the time. There were, of course, immediate rip off films like Grizzly and Orca. But Jaws cast a long shadow and it set the basic pattern for man against nature horror films. Such a film is Rogue, a 2007 Australian outback film that features a tour group locked in battle against a giant crocodile that is hunting them for entering its territory.

At first blush, this sounds terrible, I admit. It’s not even the only Australian crocodile movie released in 2007; it came out just after Black Water. And it is exactly what it sounds like it is—a group of outback tourists including an American travel writer named Peter (Michael Vartan) take a tour led by guide Kate (Radha Mitchell) through an outback swamp. The tour goes along well until they turn back for home. One of the tourists believes that he sees a flare in the distance. The flare is repeated, and Kate makes the decision (essentially with the approval of most of the group) to investigate.

Wednesday Horror: Wolf Creek

Film: Wolf Creek
Format: DVD from NetFlix on The New Portable.

I’m honestly not sure where to start with a movie like Wolf Creek. This is a modern horror film in every sense it is possible for me to mean that phrase. While it might seem like it has pretensions of being old school in its simplicity. What I mean specifically is that this is a movie that seemed to learn something from films like The Blair Witch Project. I’ll explain that more completely.

In an interview about the movie Scream, Wes Craven said that to make a really effective horror film, you need to hit the audience immediately, and then you don’t need to hit them hard again until the ending. Wolf Creek doesn’t do this. Instead, it’s a good 40 minutes or so before our foil even appears on screen, and almost that long, more than 30 minutes at least, before anything remotely like a horror movie takes place. Almost the first half of this movie is a sort of low-budget travelogue of three young people, Australian Ben (Nathan Phillips) and Brits Liz (Cassandra Magrath) and Kristy (Kestie Morassi) driving across the Australian outback.