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Wake in Fright

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Wake in Fright

For a long time Wake in Fright (aka Outbreak) was regarded as one of the ‘great lost Australian films’. Although critically celebrated across the board its infamously unsympathetic presentation of Australia, unflinching hunting scenes and poor box office saw it lost to the annals of history. Back in 2009, Ted Kotcheff’s film was restored bringing it back from obscurity to the plaudits of revered filmmakers and critics alike. Now in 2014, Eureka are giving it a limited theatrical re-release before unleashing it onto the home video market on their Masters of Cinema label in the coming weeks.

As part of John Grant’s (Gary Bond) contract as a bonded-teacher he has to teach wherever he is posted until he has repaid his $1,000 fees. Through that he has been posted in the remote township of Tiboonda. With Christmas approaching Grant leaves Tiboonda stopping overnight at Bundanyabba (The Yabba) before flying to Sydney to spend the holiday with his girlfriend. Greeted in the Yabba by Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty), he is embraced into the hospitality of the town and later their local gambling scene. After a bout of luck, the young teacher believes he can pay off his debt, escaping his ‘bondage’, an optimism that quickly sees him broke and at rock bottom.

Wake in Fright

Beer is everything in the Yabba, and by extension Wake in Fright’s Australia. When Grant meets Jock, the local law enforcer stares at his full pint of beer as if to say ‘go on, drink up mate’. Even when he’s drank a few pints, he still forcefully stares at his untouched pint as if to say not drinking is anti-social. There’s nothing else to drink, as frankly pointed out by Donald Pleasance’s Doc – Water is used wash. This all accumulates into a brand of forceful hospitality that decrees Yabba’s pace to be the only pace. While exaggerated into a hyper-masculine version of 21st century alcoholism, the city is just the surface of this lost holiday.

In a place that has no purpose for money is Doc’s dilapidated shack, it’s here where the film earned its right to be called the most “… terrifying film about Australia in existence” (Nick Cave). Australian New Wave or “Ozploitation” is notorious for assimilating real (or frighteningly authentic) hunting scenes. Wake in Fright is one of the harsher, reducing the impact of the Razorback’s of the world.  The way the Kangaroo’s twitch in death is the brand of traumatic imagery that burrows its way deep into your mind, never to be forgotten.

More specific to the Kotcheff’s successes is the editing and score. As the film opens and Grant is teaching a class that spans several age groups, where the music by John Scott is deceptively jaunty. Serving to illustrate his blissful ignorance about what is in store for him and the first time viewer. After one binge too many, Grant wakes to find Doc standing over him, where the composition has taken a turn for the worse, gone is the carefree music and in its place is a discordant and arrhythmic atmosphere piece.

Wake in Fright

Music that evokes timelessness of the vast empty landscapes penning in the Yabba, this is a score that circles Grant, Doc, Dick & Joe in a world apathetic to time or place, all that matters here is a consumption that erodes who you once were.  Music that’s by its accompanying imagery that’s been edited together in a way that has since become one of the models of horror cinema concerned with the mental state. From Donald Pleasance with the ‘two up’ coins over his eyes to Gary Bond, drunk, struggling to finish off a Kangaroo – these montages are expertly timed and framed.

 Whether Kotcheff’s take on Kenneth Cook’s book (of the same name) views Australia with an unfavourable insight or vivid exaggerations, the result is still the same. With a career defining performance from Donald Pleasance, Wake in Fright is all the validation ‘Ozploitation’ ever needed. This is a film that horrifies through the mutation and brutalisation of something as social accepted as alcohol. Regardless of its reputation, it takes an incredibly talented film maker to make something so ordinary into an object of genuine fear. Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright brings the very best and worst of Australia into a film that’s one of the all-time greats where location functions as character.

 Wake in Fright

SPECIAL FEATURES

  • New 1080p high-definition restoration of the film on the Blu-ray and a progressive encode on the DVD
  • Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hearing-impaired
  • Feature length audio commentary with director Ted Kotcheff and editor Anthony Buckley
  • Video interview from 2009 with Ted Kotcheff
  • ABC s 7:30 Report video piece on the rediscovery and restoration of the film
  • Who Needs Art? vintage piece on Wake in Fright
  • Chips Rafferty obituary clip
  • Outback TV spot
  • UK theatrical trailer
  • 48-PAGE BOOKLET featuring essays by Adrian Martin, Peter Galvin, Meg Labrum, Graham Shirley, Ted Kotcheff and Anthony Buckley, and archival imagery.

Filed under: Cinema, Home Releases, Masters of Cinema, World & Indie

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