Slasher movie villains are typically depicted as unstoppable forces of nature, but Wolf Creek 2 takes a new tack. It reimagines Mick Taylor, John Jarratt's iconic outback butcher, as a deranged nativist, purging Australia of foreigners one dismembered corpse at a time. This is inspired: Australia has become one of the premier nations for horror, and in Wolf Creek 2 Mick Taylor represents the idea of Australia as forbidding territory becoming conscious of itself, actively seeking to purify the homeland and create an Australia "for Australians." It's a wicked, mercilessly clever revision of the first film, offering a portrait of rugged individualism taken to pathological extremes. (In one scene, Taylor is recast as the Marlboro Man himself, riding nobly out of the sunset.) But for all the film's social comment, McLean doesn't skimp on chills and thrills, maintaining the first film's chokehold right through the surprising final showdown. Here's hoping McLean and Jarratt come back to complete the trilogy—perhaps by showing us Taylor's outsider campaign for Prime Minister?
In what may be Ti West's scariest film yet, The Sacrament offers a thinly fictionalized retelling of the fate of Jim Jones' People's Temple, where the congregants committed mass suicide in Guyana in 1978 by drinking Flavor Aid laced with cyanide. Jonestown has long since become a universal point of reference, even for people (like myself) who weren't even born yet when it happened; how often do you hear a reference to "drinking the Kool Aid"? The great strength of West's film is that it drives home the sheer visceral ugliness of the event: a sermon delivered over loudspeakers promising transcendent glory and divine sacrifice while people died in agony, their bodies sprawled out on the grass as they tried to crawl away. The notion of framing the film as a Vice documentary was also kind of brilliant, giving it a sense of verisimilitude and freshness beyond the usual handheld horror. While The Sacrament is fictionalized, a great many of the details are true to the actual events—and for anyone who's heard the ghastly audio recording of the event (what can I say, it's been sampled by punk and metal bands for years), it's eerie how closely much of the final sermon echoes what's heard there. And Gene Jones (who you might remember as the gas station owner in No Country For Old Men—call it, friendo) is excellent as "Father." The Sacrament probably won't get much recognition outside of horror circles, but remind me to scoff when Ti West's next movie catapults him out of the horror ghetto and people who look down their nose at genre cinema start talking about what a great director he is.
Also: while The Sacrament loses none of the enormity and horror of the real events, it ironically understates them: the film's final death toll is revealed in an epilogue card as 167; at Jonestown, it was 909.
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