Wake in Fright (1971)

It comes from the age of Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange, but none of those movies can match the sheer hardcore shock of the Australian New Wave nightmare Wake in Fright from 1971.

The film's vision of masculine self-sufficiency is built around--and on, via Australia's own bloody colonial history--an elemental violence.

It's simultaneously terrifying and hilarious, a full-on shotgun blast to the face of rediscovered 1970s weirdness, something like finding out that there's a classic Peckinpah film you've never seen, or that Wes Craven and Bernardo Bertolucci got drunk in Sydney one weekend and decided to make a movie together.

It's not dated. It is powerful, genuinely shocking and rather amazing.

A jolting cinematic experience, Wake in Fright bites like a dingo and kicks like a mule.

Push any guy long enough with alcohol and aggressive masculinity, the film suggests, and you'll find an XY-chromosomed predator lurking behind the mask.

A road movie using undeveloped land as a blank screen on which to project a dark deconstruction of masculinity and manifest destiny.

Disturbing? Yes. But it is a meandering tale **** stuck somewhere that is just unpleasant to watch with no payoff in the end. It just feels like a cheap trick is the discomfort of being stuck somewhere you don't want to be. Donald Pleasance is incredible though, as usual.

Vraiment à chier ce "Réveil"...?! hein que quoi où comment ?... où ça ? Putain ouais, faudrait vraiment veiller à se réveiller messieurs le réal' et le scribouillard du script, parce que là ça craint sévère. A part boire de la bière, apparemment une bière locale qu'elle est bonne et qu'on en boit beaucoup dans le coin et dans toute l'Australie, à part se torcher la tronche donc avec cette "West End" et aller chasser le kangourou en bagnole, puis reboire de la bière, vomir, se suicider et recommencer, je vois pas ce que "raconte" ce film de merde. Non, vraiment pas. Mais ça m'a donné soif.