Last night I watched Wolf Creek. I didn’t know anything about this film going in, but I’d heard a few people recommend it so I gave it a shot.

The film centers around three young vacationers who are traveling through the Australian outback on their way to Sydney. On the way they stop at Wolfe Creek crater for a hike. When they return they find that their car has died, and they’re stranded alone in the outback. Their circumstance gets progressively worse, but in the end being lost in the middle of nowhere seems like heaven compared to the situation that they end up in.

Though it’s not a ground breaking movie, I enjoyed Wolf Creek. It’s a teen slasher flick with all of the cruft and nonsense that plagues the genre removed. The violence is calculated and intense, but most of it is implicit; with a few exceptions, the movie does not rely on gore for its scares. The movie also avoids most teen slasher cliches, and it manages to keep you wondering about which of the protagonists will actually survive their ordeal. And though the characters make bad decisions throughout the film, most of their actions are believable. Finally, there are some extremely beautiful shots of the Australian wilderness.

So all in all, I’d say that Wolf Creek is not bad. I like that it avoids most of the problems we associate with this brand of horror movie, and I didn’t have any problems with the acting or pacing. The movie isn’t brilliant or anything, but as a teen slasher movie it’s pretty good.