That's not a knife! THIS is a knife.

Every year, 30,000 people are reported missing in Australia. 90% of them are found within one month. The other 10% are never found at all.

So reads the opening screed of Wolf Creek, a frightening and sometimes gruelling cross between Crocodile Dundee and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This immediately raises a few eyebrows. Surely that's like....82 people a day? Even discounting the folks who show up again, that's like eight people disappearing every day. In a first world country? Sounds a bit suspicious to me.

Still, what's not in dispute is that over the past decade there has been a spate of actual murders in Australia, popularly nicknamed The Backpacker Murders, which follow the disturbingly similar pattern: A couple or trio of backpackers get lost in the Australian Outback, where they are befriended and then attacked by a seemingly affable drifter. The most recent of these was the very controversial case of Peter Falconio, which was so recent that I thought this movie was suprisingly bold (perhaps insensitively so), as while it is a fictionalized recreation, it is heavily modelled on the Falconio case and the many other backpacker murders.

The story is very basic: two British backpackers, Liz and Kristy, travel with an Aussie boy (Ben, who looks oddly like Zane Low) they've met up with, to see Wolf Creek (which is a real place, adding to the authentic, 'documentary' feel of the film), an enormous meteor crater in the Outback. After their car breaks down in mysterious circumstances, they are offered assistance from a 'good keen aussie bloke' who lives off the land, Mick. Mick is one of the more inventive and original screen villains I have seen in a while- a cheery chap who laughs his way through his hobby of... well, I won't tell you what his hobby is, but it ain't fun, and there are several scenes (one in particular which had the entire audience cringing) of suprising brutality.

The film is short, sharp and violent. While there aren't any 'twists' per se, it certainly unfolds more like a recreation of actual events, as opposed to a scripted movie with pre-plotted events. The acting is naturalistic and convincing (although I did notice that the 'British' backpackers reverted to their Australian accents when screaming), with particular kudos to John Jarret for being so unnervingly evil- the whole thing is close enough to reality to be distinctly creepy. Even with a variety of "beauty-shots" of the Australian countryside (in the best looking low-budget high-def film I've seen yet), I can see this film cutting into Aussie tourist dollars.

Recommended if you have a strong stomach and enjoy a good horror yarn.