The “sadistic” movie that made Roger Ebert “want to vomit and cry at the same time”
Cinema is supposed to provide an emotional roller coaster, but in a good way. The best movies take audiences on a journey with ups, downs, heartbreak, fear, excitement, joy, devastation, and every other emotion under the sun. What they don’t want is to be left feeling like they want to cry and throw up simultaneously, which was an unfortunate by-product of a film Roger Ebert couldn’t stand.
Well, maybe some people do, and fair fucks if that’s the case. However, most folks don’t want to be torn between reaching for the tissues and the sick bag, especially when watching something they hate every second of. Critics gotta do what critics gotta do, though, which left Ebert with no choice but to persevere.
In the early 2000s, horror underwent its latest evolution. Just like the slasher boom dominated the 1980s and the self-awareness of Scream influenced a thousand imitators a decade later, the turn of the millennium placed two new trends at the genre’s forefront: found footage and torture porn. Both subsets have plenty of decent entries, but a lot of them were just grotesque for the sake of it.
Based on a zero-star review, there’s no need to wonder how Ebert felt about writer, director, and producer Greg McLean’s vicious Australian nasty, Wolf Creek. “It is a film with one clear purpose,” he wrote. “To establish the commercial credentials of its director by showing his skill at depicting the brutal tracking, torture, and mutilation of screaming young women.”
When John Jarratt’s Mick Taylor, the serial killer at the centre of the story, severs one of his victims’ spines, the critic admitted he “wanted to walk out of the theatre and keep on walking.” The misogynistic undertones didn’t sit well either, and Ebert loathed Wolf Creek so much that he actively sought out other reviews to find out if he was in the minority.
To his surprise, or horror, to be more accurate, he was. Once he discovered that plenty of praise was being lavished on the 21st-century exploitation flick, he scoured the internet to see if anyone shared his feelings on how he felt while watching it, which was that it “made me want to vomit and cry at the same time.”
“I like horror films,” Ebert helpfully clarified, although that wasn’t always the case. “Horror movies, even extreme ones, function primarily by scaring us or intriguing us. Wolf Creek is more like the guy at the carnival sideshow who bites off chicken heads. No fun for us, no fun for the guy, no fun for the chicken.”
As for anyone who dared laugh at any point, Ebert found them “dehumanized, unevolved, or a slackwit,” not that the movie was aiming for the funny bone. He thought it was violent for no other reason than to push the boundaries of good taste, and despite being aware that “there is a role for violence in film,” he couldn’t comprehend why Wolf Creek crossed the line so far that it was a speck in the distance.
“What in the hell is the purpose of this sadistic celebration of pain and cruelty?” he asked. To appeal to horror fans would be the answer, and it’s an understatement to say this one didn’t appeal to him.
