Absolutely Fantastic

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Okay I must have missed something. I watched this movie purely based on the reviews it got, like "Best movie I ever saw" and so on... This movie is everything but the best movie I ever saw, it's garbage, and I really don't get how anybody could write a positive review about this. I give it two stars because there are actually even worse movies, but it came close to be in my absolute worse movies I ever saw list. There is almost no story, at least no interesting story. You can't even spoil the movie because there is nothing to say about it. The acting is sometimes terrible. All they do is drinking, gambling and talk nonsense. The worst part is the murdering of kangaroos, it's just awful to watch. I don't know why you would put that in a movie. Probably to shock people but in my mind you must be a sick person to like watching stuff like that. I thought it looked all real and I was right because in the end credits they openly admit it was real footage of a kangaroo massacre. So to me the moviemakers are sick bastards and all the people that like this movie as well. Enjoy your cruel disgusting life.

A school teacher, an educated, slightly aloof man, makes a brief stop in an outback town on his way to meet his fiancé in Sydney. The local law enforcer, a too-matey patriarchal figure, befriends him, and the teacher is drawn into the underbelly of the town's drinking and gambling culture, beginning an inexorable descent into hell. The film perfectly captures an enduring moment in Australian masculinity, the "mate" culture and suicidal binge drinking, the carnivalesque attitude to authority, the incongruous connections to empire. At first the teacher pinches his nose, sneering at the stagey tribute to war dead, decrying the gambling to a fellow intellectual, a doctor. But the doctor turns out to be a shape-shifter, as central to the Bacchanalian insanity as anyone. The rawness of the drinking, the ugliness of the alcohol-fuelled revelry, the despair of women, the savagery of a kangaroo hunt - this film offers up so many iconic images, powerful, insightful moments that fully utilise cinema's potential. Rightly regarded as a classic of Australian cinema, this is a fine example of the mirror to society's failing that 1970s filmmaking excelled in.

I am utterly perplexed by the high praise lavished on the re-issue of this film in 2014. The cinematography is not bad at times - the bar scenes, the gambling and the kangaroo hunt are all quite well done; and the music is effective. Otherwise this film is marred by bad acting, unconvincing episodes, overlong and repetitive scenes and, above all, the lack of interesting or engaging characters. Do we really care what happens to John Grant? Are we allowed any insights into his character, or any of the other stereotypes he meets? Most puzzling is the lack of tension or threat. Wake in fright? - fright of what? At no time is John Grant in any real jeopardy. In sum: of interest as a portrayal of boorish and drunken male culture in 1970s Australia, but of very little value otherwise.

When one-room schoolteacher John Grant (Gary Bond) ends up in the dusty little one-horse town of "Yabba," he finds himself down and all but out: drunkenly gambling away what little money he has, he finds himself wandering from place to place in search of sustenance (which consists mostly of beer, which he guzzles with great gusto throughout the movie). (An odd habit, that: alcohol dehydrates you, yet everyone in this town guzzles it like it's going out of style.) Grant wakes after one drinking binge to find himself in the shack of "Doc Tyden" (Donald Pleasence). "I'm a doctor of medicine," he tells Grant: "And a tramp by temperament." Along with a pair of Doc's drinking buddies, he and Grant go on a late night shooting spree. Their prey: kangaroos. In what's easily one of the most disturbing animal-killing sequences in any movie ever made, we see the 'roos actually being shot on camera. A "disclaimer" of sorts at the end of the movie tells us that the slaughter was handled "by licensed professionals." I can't help but equate THAT one with the abrogations of Nazi soldiers: "We were just following orders." Grant gets so caught up in the bloodletting that he cuts the throat of a 'roo (a one-eyed 'roo, at that) before winding up back in the cabin with Doc- who proceeds to sexually assault him. Heads or tails, WAKE IN FRIGHT is a disturbing but must-see piece of filmmaking.