When we talk about the raw, sweating, soul-crushing brilliance of the Ozploitation era, this film isn’t just on the list—it’s the cornerstone.
Yet by the 1990s, Wake in Fright had developed a cult reputation as Australia’s great lost film because its master negative had gone missing, leading to censored, degraded prints used for its few television broadcasts and VHS releases. It’s a film that sat in a vault in Pittsburgh — the film’s editor, Anthony Buckley, tracked the film down to CBS’s Iron Mountain archives in the Steel City, where an initial 60 cans of film were found in a shipping container marked “For Destruction” — for years before being saved. This is a miracle, because this is quite possibly one of the most terrifying movies ever made about civilization and how quickly it peels away like sunburned skin in the Outback.
John Grant (Gary Bond) is a refined, prissy schoolteacher who wants nothing more than to leave his desert teaching post for a posh holiday in Sydney. He makes one stop in Bundanyabba, which is known as The Yabba. It’s a mining town that functions less like a town and more like a heat-induced purgatory—and gets dragged into a cycle of booze, gambling and a suffocating brand of mate-ship that feels like a chokehold.
Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence) is a disgraced, alcoholic doctor who has just… given up on life. He’s the devil on the shoulder of every man in town. Throw in a kangaroo hunt, and you’re in the midst of a savage movie where people have nothing left to lose. By the end, John has given up on life too, convinced he’ll never leave The Yabba, yet disliking everyone there. Even a suicide attempt fails to end things after a downward spiral that includes John stabbing a kangaroo and Doc forcing himself on the man.
At the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, Kotcheff is sitting there sweating out the premiere. A young guy behind him was absolutely losing his mind over every frame. Every time something crazy happened, he shouted out, “Wow! What a scene! Boy, I didn’t expect that. This is great!” And when things get… let’s say, intense—specifically during that gritty homosexual encounter between John and Doc—the guy is basically narrating the future of cinema: “This director, he’s going to go all the way. He’s going to go all the way! Oh my God! He went all the way!”
Kotcheff is so buzzing from this guy’s enthusiasm that he has his PR manager track him down. Turns out, it was none other than a young Martin Scorsese. Back then, he was just a nobody whose first flick, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, had tanked at the box office. Talk about a full-circle moment: the guy cheering on a cult masterpiece in ’71 would return to Cannes five years later to snag the Palme d’Or himself for Taxi Driver.
As for Kotcheff, he would go on to make First Blood, Uncommon Valor, Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?, Fun With Dick and Jane, North Dallas Forty and, strangely, Weekend at Bernie’s.
Scorsese never forgot that screening. When he curated the Cannes Classics program in 2009, he ensured Wake in Fright returned to the big screen. He called it “speechless”—a quote they slapped on all the marketing for the film’s re-release and even on the promos for the 2017 TV miniseries. When that played, all those years later, people walked out during the kangaroo hunt.
Speaking of going all the way, we have to go into detail on the elephant—or, in this case, the kangaroo—in the room.
That hunting scene.
It’s the moment the film stops being a psychological fever dream and turns into a waking, bleeding nightmare. That sequence isn’t some clever bit of practical effects or clever editing. That is pure, unadulterated reality, and it’s hard as hell to stomach.
The producers slapped a disclaimer at the end of the credits, trying to justify it, claiming it was captured during an actual professional hunt and included because of the dire state of kangaroo conservation at the time. They checked with animal welfare groups, got the green light and put it on the screen to show the world exactly what was happening in the Outback.
But behind the scenes? It was an absolute disaster.
Cinematographer Brian West didn’t mince words about it. He said that it became an “orgy of killing.” The hunters, fueled by the same booze that poisons John Grant’s life in the movie, started getting reckless. They were missing their marks, leaving animals suffering and turning a professional cull into a sloppy, sickening bloodbath. It got so bad that producer George Willoughby actually passed out on set after watching one of the animals get obliterated in the most gruesome way imaginable.
The irony is thick enough to choke on: the crew, who had traveled all the way to the middle of nowhere to capture the truth of Australia, eventually reached their breaking point. They realized they were filming a snuff movie and were accidentally drawn into a slaughter. They actually had to stage a fake power failure just to pull the plug on the cameras and stop the carnage.
It’s a brutal reminder that when you go looking for the dark side of humanity, you might find more blood than you bargained for.
The Arrow Video release of Wake In Fright has audio commentary by director Ted Kotcheff and editor Anthony Buckley and a second commentary by Peter Galvin, author of The Making of Wake in Fright; Return to the ‘Yabba, a featurette tracking down the film’s Broken Hill locations; interviews with director of photography Brian West, composer John Scott, director Ted Kotcheff, Jack Thompson and sound editors Keith Palmer and Eddy Joseph; The Cinema’s Great Squeaky Bald Git, an appreciation of actor Donald Pleasence by film historian Kim Newman; The Filmmaker and the Film Buff, a discussion between Philippe Mora and Paul Harris; a Q&A with Ted Kotcheff from the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival; alternative scenes from the Outback cut of this movie; a 2009 TV report on the rediscovery and restoration; Who Needs Art?, a 1971 TV segment with behind-the-scenes footage; Chips Rafferty obituary by Ken G. Hall; a U.S. theatrical trailer and TV spot; Foreign Visions of Local Stories, a trailer reel of Australian films helmed by overseas filmmakers; an image gallery; a collectors’ booklet featuring new writing on the film by Jay Slater, Paul Lê and David Michael Brown plus archive materials — all in a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Jeff Marshall. You can get this on UHD and Blu-ray from MVD.
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