Watch Wake in Fright For Free

good back-story, and good acting

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The acting in this movie is really good.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

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.

A lot of films have tried to capture the isolation and expanse of the Australian landscape, but few have laid it bare as raw and honestly as this film does.Made in the year of my birth, it shows an older Australia, which, for the most part, is no longer visible to the naked eye in the capital cities, yet still lingers at it's core.This should be added to the national curriculum to show how far we've come, and how much we don't want to lose.At it's heart it shows the struggle between the haves and have nots, in an environment of Australian (class-less) egalitarianism.

This film had apparently been lost for over 30 years before it was found again, it was added into the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I had to see if it was all worth it, directed by Ted Kotcheff (Fun with Dick and Jane, First Blood). Basically in Australia, John Grant (Gary Bond) is a middle-class teacher from the big city who arrives in the rough outback mining town of Bundanyabba, known as "The Yabba". John plans to stay overnight before catching the plane to Sydney, he has accepted a position at the tiny school in Tiboonda, but John's one night is stretched to five by his own methods. It is through encountering many discomfiting characters, such as medical practitioner "Doc" Tydon (Donald Pleasence) and policeman Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty), and a series of alcoholic fuelled nights out, that John causes his own self-destruction. When the alcohol effects fade away there is little left of the original man, John becomes self-loathing trapped in a desolate wasteland, and he contemplates suicide with the one bullet he has left in his rifle, will he get out of it and get back to a sane civilisation? Also starring Sylvia Kay as Janette Hynes, Jack Thompson as Dick, Peter Whittle as Joe, Al Thomas as Tim Hynes and John Meillon as Charlie. Bond as the frustrated teacher going downhill during his time in the small town is good, and Pleasence proves himself a good character actor, this film has been called the "Australian Deliverance", I can see what similarities with the format, the film makes you feel uncomfortable with its disturbing imagery, and you hope desperately the leading character will get out of the downward spiral, a weird but worthwhile thriller. Very good!

A good Australian drama that had the potential to be great. The background and setup were excellent. As you go further into the story you feel more and more trapped, as the lead character is. The writer and director take you on a downward spiral of alcoholism and hellscape-entrapment. It is suffocating, the lead character's predicament, and plays out almost like a horror movie. You can check out but you can never leave...The movie also shows the pointlessness and futurelessness of rural redneck life.However, from a point is almost starts to glamorize this lifestyle. There are several consecutive scenes that are quite irritating to watch: the drunken parties, the random kangaroo killings, the general drunken boganism. While this shows what awaits the lead character, it is very annoying.A tighter script around the 2/3rds mark and a grittier follow- through on the setup and this would have been a brilliant movie.