Upsetting Day: Wake in Fright 🌭

Just after midnight, outside the last Tower Records in existence, deep in the bowels of one of Wuhan’s apartment cities, a lonely, pixelated saxophone plays. Rifling through his yellow plastic bag and grasping at hope is a desperate man on his way to nowhere. He’s got a date with a black box the size of a stack of pizzas. He just bought…laserdiscs in the rain.

This is of course the ongoing column-within-a-column where I dissect weird movies my Dad made me watch way too young because he was excited to have scored the laserdiscs. DVDs in the snow has been suspended; apologies to its many fans.

When the pater familias sat me and my brother down to choke on today’s film, he said it was “a cult classic” and “represented Australia perfectly.” I was already old enough to know that meant desolation and scorpion toxin- six – but what I hadn’t counted on was how little else there really is to the continent.

This movie represents Australia perfectly the same way vegemite represents Australia perfectly: by being disgusting and baffling anyone raised in a society. To this day, every time someone tells me a film “perfectly encapsulates Australia” that seems to be code for lots of shots of empty hellscape and people being unrepentantly brutal to one another. Sometimes Guy Pearce is there.

1971’s Wake In Fright falls squarely into one of my Dad’s favorite laserdisc subgenres, “imported foreign movies where nothing happens.” You spend the entire first half of the movie waiting for a plot to spin up before realizing “oh, wait, him rambling around talking to dipshits is the plot.” But unlike your average early ’70s hippie bullshit snoozer, Wake In Fright has the added benefit of making you feel greasy and scummy the entire time, like a movie made entirely of Ren & Stimpy extreme closeups.

This climaxes in a sequence so shocking I’m going to talk about it later to force you to read the whole article (here’s a hint: piles of dead kangaroos!).

In a nutshell, Wake in Fright tells the story of what happens when you’re broke and wasted in the Australian outback, but with a little less sandy penetration than you’re imagining.

The opening sequence takes place at a schoolhouse so remote that if you order DoorDash to it it costs you your firstborn child and several liters of blood (plus convenience fee). The school and the hotel that comprise the town duel across some railroad tracks over who can be dumpier, and both win. Then we find out the movie is based on a book, so you know you’re in trouble.

Like our protagonist, a shitty schoolteacher who gets waylaid by yokels while on his way back to Sydney to meet his girlfriend, the film takes a number of leisurely pit stops to soak up local color, by which I primarily mean a bar where people bet on coin tosses and treat it like a goddamn fight club.

Really, I can’t stress enough that a full twenty minutes of this acclaimed movie is watching people toss coins, bet on whether the coins will come up heads or tails, and then process those bets. It’s like if Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead was sent by England to colonize aboriginal land.

This was the point in the movie I remember asking Dad if we really had to watch this on my birthday, to which he replied “twice because you just talked.” As for the rest of Acts I and II, this lovingly restored masterpiece of Aussie cinema (or “chunderwuzzer” as they call it) is essentially one long beer commercial, which also feels achingly right.

The teacher gets a couple beers at his hotel, takes a train and has some train beer with the train people, then heads to a bar for a couple beers. To establish that he loves his girlfriend, we even get a flashback where he rubs a beer lovingly on her titties.

Australia, if you’re trying to communicate that you all have to piss very badly most of the time, I’m reading you loud and clear. Speaking of clear, that’s the same color this guy’s pee has never been. The one time he does drink water, it’s from a single water glass that the whole train shares, because Australia is a primitive land where water is scarce and backwash belongs to the community.

After he gambles away all his money, he goes on a drunken bender through the outback meeting a host of colorful hillbillies. It’s like Deliverance but if there was no rape and no one was forcing you to do it, you’re just an asshole who wants to gawp at yokels. Yet even though no humans die, Wake in Fright somehow feels so much grosser than Deliverance that the yokels from Deliverance probably use it as training material.

Somewhere along the way he shares a meal with Donald Pleasence, which I bring up because the steak cost a dollar and came with fries and unlimited free coffee. This comprises the most pleasant concept presented in the film.

Despite this largesse, it’s impossible to come away without the impression that Australians are a sad and violent cadre of drunken wastrels scrabbling in the dirt like dogs just to forget their awful lives for one fleeting moment. People keep asking us “don’t you like it here?” like those Twilight Zone folks who had to stay positive all the time. Also, their accents are so thick that the movie sometimes has subtitles even though they’re speaking English, or at least their pitiable approximation of it, mate.

The teacher whose name escapes me takes a brief pause from downing beers like shots to try and cheat on his girlfriend, the ale-tittied one, but is saved from infidelity by the fact that the second he gets his pants undone he fully vomits the entire contents of his stomach right by the lady’s head. This is, I’m going to assume now and forever, how all Australians make love. Finally, a lovemaking scene I can show to my wife and say “See? It’s normal!”

Empty and therefore ready for more beer, our hero heads back inside and we spend ten minutes on a montage of the evening’s entertainment, which is betting on when a pregnant dog will pop and waterboarding Donald Pleasence with beer while he stands on his head – you know, party stuff.

The climax of the movie comes later that night when he goes out into the brush with some buddies. Things start off strong when it appears that the ghostbusters have arrived.

Unfortunately, we find out it’s the Australian ghostbusters, by which I mean drunken assholes hunting kangaroo. They kill one baby kanga with a hunting dog, one with their car, and one with a gun, like trying to rack up a combo multiplier in a Tony Hawk game.

Then they just generally massacre kangaroos with rifles for so long that it goes from day to night and you forget what the rest of the movie was about, before bitterly remembering it was nothing and you’ve wasted yet more of your precious life.

Speaking of wasted life, the footage of murdered roos is actually just…real footage of guys murdering kangaroos. The film crew tagged along with some hunters because it was cheaper than effects, and I suspect this is the only reason the movie’s still talked about. This was what weirdos had to watch before the advent of rotten.com.

As a result, we’re treated to dead and dying kangaroos shot multiple times, entrails out, pouches ritually defiled, the works. The film crew was actually so disgusted by the drunken hunters that they faked an equipment failure to end the night early. What’s incredible, though, is that just after experiencing that, they decided making a bunch of other people experience it would be cool too. Hey, so did I! Here’s a man wrestling with a kangaroo until he’s able to slit its throat.

That’s also the part where Dad leaned over to me and repeated “Cult. Classic.” I settled into my oshkosh and sipped a juicebox apprehensively. This movie makes you feel gross all the way down, like a turd wrapped in boogers. Then it proudly proclaims to be representing what Australia’s really like, and I have no reason to question that except for the lack of venomous scorpions.

Our guy ultimately does one smart thing and tries to shoot himself in the head to get out of Australia, but instead he wakes up in the hospital, presumably with a beer IV, and the doctors call it an accident.

The key takeaway here is that no one made this man do these things. The movie acts like he’s stuck in Hell, but he could hop a train out of there at any time, he just chooses not to. He wrestles and sleeps in shit and flies and then goes home; that’s the whole plot. At the end he just goes back to being a schoolteacher and tells his pal about what amounts to his Wild Spring Break.

You did it, Wake in Fright. I fear Australia. I fear her and her half-formed progeny. Between this, The Proposition and Fury Road, I believe Australia may be the literal gateway to the underworld, and I hope I never set foot in her until I’m finally called home to her cursed shores for my wicked deeds. Additionally, g’day to any Aussie fans out there!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Kyle Campbell, who fought extra hard in every boxing match he’s had against a kangaroo purely out of spite for the animal.