Ye Gods, what a strange film. If you haven't yet seen this film (as I hadn't until a few days ago), seek it out and make a date. Truly disturbing, it tells the story **SPOILERS FROM HERE** of John Grant, a teacher at a small village school who decides to visit his girlfriend in Sydney. On the way, he stops off for one night (he thinks) in 'the Yabba' a town inhabited by some rather over-friendly people who force alcohol on him and virtually control his life. They are his 'mates' whether he likes it or not. As he has lost every cent in the local gambling den, he has no way out and nowhere to stay except at the homes of these hard-drinking troglodytes, and in a short time he is just as bad as any of them and spends his days in an alcoholic haze. Is there any end to this hell on Earth? I suppose this film sets out to show how our sheen of civilization hides our inner self under the surface, and how little it takes to corrupt us, especially when we can see no way out. A truly awful but brilliant film. Get yours today.

'Wake in Fright' is a film that explores a nightmarish descent into madness in the most disturbing, terrifying, yet perfect manner possible. The very first shot of the film(an overhead wide angle shot) establishes the desolate, isolated nature of the setting. The protagonist Gary Bond, a British school teacher in Tiboonda, a remote township in the Australian Outback, is clearly trapped in the middle of nowhere and Bond is all too aware of this fact. We see him verbalise his contempt towards the educational system for tying him down with a financial bond and making him their slave. When the Christmas vacation starts, Bond with the intention of going to Sydney to visit his girlfriend, first makes his way to a nearby town named Bundanyabba which the locals call 'Yabba'. Once in Yabba, Bond comes into contact with the locals who seem over-exuberant to make his acquaintance and offer him their booze. Once the booze starts to get gulped, everything goes crazy.The reckless drinking in Yabba pretty much takes Bond on a journey into the deep dark abyss of the reckless and toxic side of masculinity. The men who Bond comes across in Yabba have nothing to do except drink and indulge in highly disturbing activities which they consider to be an exercise in bonding. This desperation to one- up each other and engage in violence and uncontrolled machismo has its roots in the fact that these people have very little to do in their lives. The loneliness and pointlessness of the life of a man in the Australian Outbacks fuel their need to play with danger and grapple with their deranged conception of 'manliness' among each other. Although the alcohol is the primary reason behind the deplorable experiences that Bond goes through in Yabba, but the director Ted Kotcheff and screenwriter Evan Jones subtly imply that Bond isn't completely faultless either. His repressed frustration for being tied down to Tiboonda actually makes him feel a bit liberated once he reaches the far more populated town of Yabba. To some extent he allows himself to be taken advantage of because of his own desire to let go. Unfortunately, his quest to liberate himself from the cage of his mundane life in Tiboonda leads him to a bigger cage of alcohol and violence in Yabba.The setting of the Australian outback instantly offers a unique visual texture to the film. The setting is essential in the thematic context too and adds to the bleakness of the tone. Ted Kotcheff and his cinematographer have to be admired for expertly capturing the Outbacks which look very post-apocalyptic(reminded me of Mad Max) and they manage to make the Outbacks look almost beautifully hideous. Tone wise Kotcheff finds the perfect balance between gritty realism and almost a Nicolas Roeg-esque transgressive surrealism. The editing goes a long way in accentuating the sequences of Bond getting drowned in booze. The frantic nature with which Kotcheff and his editor cut the film complements the frantic nature of the violence and debauchery on screen. 'Wake in Fright's grainy visual texture and its cynical view of humanity leaves a bit of an air of hopelessness in the mind of the viewer and the uninhibited nature of its dedication to capture this cynicism can be equated with the original 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre'. I have read that Scorsese was hugely influenced by 'Wake in Fright' and that makes me want to make another analogy. The descent into nightmarish madness that Gary Bond embarks upon in this film is somewhat similar to the colourful and idiosyncratic night that Paul Hackett goes through in Scorsese's 'After Hours'. Although 'After Hours' is a black comedy and is nowhere near as disturbing as 'Wake in Fright', but the fish out of water element in both the films is certainly comparable.John Grant is wonderful as Gary Bond. The transitions that he goes through in the course of the film are well executed and he does well to portray the inner struggles, the dilemma and heartbreak which add depth to the character. Donald Pleasence is brilliantly disturbing as the odd ball Doc Tydon. His character remains a bit of an anomaly throughout, but his presence and peculiar mannerisms help to add an unsettling element in various scenes.'Wake in Fright' is to alcoholism, what 'Requiem for a Dream' is to drug use. But having said that, it will be unfair to describe 'Wake in Fright' as nothing but a cautionary tale about reckless drinking. It is deeper than that. This film has things to say about the toxic masculinity of the 1970s in the Australian Outbacks, the reasons for which are rooted in plain boredom. It explores the perils of loneliness and throws light on how one can lose control of his/her senses when living a life of utter discontentment. 'Wake in Fright' is not for everyone, but for me, it is a dark, unsettling and surreal masterpiece.

Wake In Fright is like one of those clammy nightmares where you are stuck in some godawful place full of ugliness and depravity, and try as you might, you simply can't escape or outrun the horror around you. Such is the plight of John (Gary Bond) a schoolteacher in a desolate county of the Australian outback, on his way to Sydney for a little R&R on winter break. His journey takes him to a pit stop in Bundanyabba, an assss backwards mining town in the middle of the middle of nowhere. He stops by the bar, where the leathery sheriff (Chips Rafferty) offers to buy him a beer. And another. And another. And another. You see, the Yabba is such an isolated doldrum of a place that it's inhabitants resort to extreme alcoholism on a daily and nightly basis, which combined with their sun baked brains leads to some harrowing displays of excessive and whacked out behaviour, that poor John comes face to face with. It's funny that his last name is Bond, because he has the air of sophistication akin to our dear old 007, and it clashes with these yowling yokels like baking soda and petrified vinegar. His composure starts to creak as each pint of lager cascades it's way down his esophagus, until the line between civilization and primal Instinct starts to scare him. But is it too late by then? He somewhat befriends Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence) a raging drunkard who hangs around with a group who do nothing but drink, howl like lunatics, fight and hunt kangaroos. Pleasence is transfixing as a once cultured man of medicine whose soul has been drenched in the endless consumption of beer and calcified by the mad, acrid sun, until the whites of his eyes begin to reveal the decay beneath. The scenes of alcohol drinking in this film are staggering, frequent and very, very disturbing. The loneliness has bred this behaviour and these people know nothing else but inebriation and idle time wasting, their lives reduced to one long episodic bout of day drinking and nocturnal revelry. John veers eerily close to falling directly in line with them and going to far down that path, especially during a nighttime kangaroo hunt that serves as some perverted form of an initiation ritual. I must warn you: not only are the hunting scenes very, very graphic, but they're completely un-staged. The adage "it's just a movie" doesn't apply to these sequences, and the carnage we see unfold is horrifying genuine. The hunts were supervised by the Australian government and conducted in an overpopulated area by experts. None of that makes them any easier to watch. This film serves as an anthropological treatise on what happens to human beings who live in the farthest and most remote corners of the world, left to their own devices by seclusion and time, relegated to near animalistic states that to them is just another day in the Yabba. Billed as a horror film, but the horror comes solely from the human elements, which to me is always far scarier. Deliverence ain't got nothing on this baby, and we're lucky we even got to see it at all. Some years after the film's bitterly received release (Australians were ticked at the depiction of their people, and probably stung deep by the truth of it) it disappeared so far into obscurity that all prints seemed to be gone, and the consensus was that it was lost forever. One day the editor was cleaning his garage on the very day he was going to liquidate everything he didn't need, and found a single print. This was nearly twenty years after the film's release, and today you can watch it on netflix Canada. Quite the story, quite the film. Just strap on a thick skin, it's a sweaty, dusty, boozy roller-coaster that dips to the very rock bottom of the human condition.

The first time I saw this film was on daytime TV around 1975. I was absolutely blown away then. The movie vanished, presumed lost for decades. Then it was tracked down and saved by the film's editor, Anthony Buckley, in Pittsburgh where it had been marked for destruction. I have watched it several times recently and it has the same effect on me. Wake in Fright is mesmerising and disturbing.What's it about? On the surface it's about school teacher John Grant (Gary Bond) paying his tuition fees off by teaching in the isolated outback of Australia. He wants out. He doesn't want to be there, doesn't understand the people, and doesn't understand the culture. It's the holidays so John sets off for Sydney and makes a stopover in a town called Yabba. In a game of two up, John nearly wins enough to pay out his tuition fees and go back to Sydney. Nearly. There is a sense of impending disaster and John is vulnerable and distressed. You really feel the fear and confusion. This isolated community have little distraction from themselves, its hot, it's oppressively hot. Drinking beer is part of the culture, ingrained in every ritual, rituals that are tragic, disturbing, ignorant, juvenile, unlawful, cruel, stupid and perverse, normal for everyone except John. Our school teacher stumbles and crashes through each encounter, it should be easier for an educated man but he can't understand it, can't really come to terms with any of it. Will it break him, or will it kill him? You will have to go through it with him and find out.