Writer / producer / director McLean confirms himself as an intelligent genre filmmaker with his second feature – following WOLF CREEK – ROGUE, a believable, heart-pounding tense and unusually well crafted nature-amok flick that would have made a great big-screen genre movie experience. Too bad then that Dimension dumped it on DVD and saddled it with misleading cover artwork suggesting an unrated gore-fest…in terms of undiscovered horror gems of the past year getting buried in a no man’s land by the Weinstein’s, the film’s fate rivals that of THE MIST.
The appealing Radha Mitchell leads a tour boat with her cute dog companion into remote Northern Queensland river territory – a densely populated area bigger than Texas and rife with deadly crocodiles. On the boat with her are a bunch of multi-national tourists including animal-hating, croc-fearing U.S. travel writer Michael Vartan. Their boat gets rammed by a particularly large croc and they all wind up trapped on a tiny mud island. Realizing that darkness is imminent and that the tide is rising, they have to figure out how to get off the island without being a human-sized croc snack.
Beautifully shot in Victoria by Will Gibson with some stunning daylight landscapes, ROGUE makes the vivid natural backdrop the film’s central character in a way recalling memorable 70’s Oz horrors like LONG WEEKEND and PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK. As in those films there’s a subdued sense of threat from this beautiful but mysterious alien territory from the very start. In fact, the whole movie has a pleasing 70’s feel to it : the pacing and filmmaking techniques recall the 70’s in the best way. Here’s a movie that refreshingly takes its time to build characters, establish mood and uses FX sparingly and effectively.
ROGUE has the basic premise of any number of Sci-Fi Channel killer animal flicks that have become the feeble norm for the revenge-of-nature sub-genre. But it outdoes them at every turn because it understands why the sub-genre’s crowned king – that’s JAWS – worked so well. McLean deftly avoids the clichés of the form : there’s no toxic waste-type back-story for the creature – it’s just a large, vicious croc of the kind that you could conceivably stumble across in this part of the country.
The sympathetic characters are wittily and credibly developed without falling into the disaster movie archetypes that usually weaken this kind of ensemble-in-peril flick. There are no fake shock tactics or loud musical stings to garner cheap thrills and the performances all round – including WOLF CREEK’s John Jarrett in a vastly different role – are excellent, with Vartan nicely low key in the Roy Scheider role of an unwitting, unlikely hero.
Key to the film’s success is that McLean know exactly when and how to show his monster. For over an hour, the croc is an almost completely hidden menace. Whole scenes convey its formidable power without actually showing it. The JAWS trick of less-is-more works a treat and when we do, briefly, see it, the effect is really jolting : there’s a strong lesson to be learned here for all those over-exposed CGI creature features.
Surprisingly given McLean’s gruesome debut, here he avoids splatter and puts the accent on suspense. Excessively gory kill scenes would detract from the carefully sustained intensity that is ROGUE’s stock in trade. There are at least two outstanding nerve-wracking set pieces. One is a terrifying nocturnal scene of panicking characters attempting to cross a river via a makeshift overhead rope as the croc closes in. The other is the film’s brilliant extended climax in which Vartan goes literally face to face with the monster in its (eerily shot) cavernous land-lair. This remarkable suspenseful pay-off offers a great showcase for the film’s exceptional combination of mostly hard-to-tell CGI and superb WETA animatronics : proof again of how CG works best in tandem with practical FX.
In taking his cue from the Spielberg film and making a convincing, tension-based survivalist horror flick rather than an outright monster-driven FX fest, McLean has triumphed.
– Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
