YMMV / Wolf Creek

• Ass Pull: At the end of season 1 of the TV series, Mick somehow manages to survive being skewered with a fire poker and the broken pieces of a javelin and having his house burned down.
• Awesome Moments:
  • Liz grabbing Mick's gun and ordering him to let Kristy go. As she was free and Mick was busy torturing Kristy, she could easily have run off and saved herself. But she wasn't about to let Mick do another thing to her friend.
  • Kristy is able to get to momentary safety on the road despite all the trauma she's been through. She doesn't waste time waiting for Liz when she knows she's probably dead, and does her best.
  • Eve comes the closest that anyone's been to killing Mick. She impales him with a fire poker, then a broken piece of javelin, and is about to go to town on him with his own knife before he dozes off to make it look like he's died of blood loss. Finally, she burns his house down. Of course, his survival makes the awesomeness here downplayed, but it's the closest thing the franchise has had to a Catharsis Factor after watching him get away with all sorts of evil, despicable acts.
• Common Knowledge: The film is 'known' for being a Gorn-fest on the same level as Saw and Hostel. It got this reputation for coming out as Torture Porn was slowly becoming a subgenre. Despite this, it's not particularly bloody. Liz's death is horrifying but not explicitly graphic. What's more is that there are only three victims and the horror comes from what Mick has probably done to Kristy and could potentially do again.
• Complete Monster: Prequel novels:
  • Origin: Jerry "The Fiddler" is an obese pedophile Mick confronts while seeking to reclaim his knife. To protect his vile lair, Jerry sets up the surrounding mine with booby traps to kill any intruders. Introduced to Mick raping a little girl, Mick finds Jerry's place littered with trophies and corpses of prior victims. When Mick's own victims are discovered by authorities, Jerry allies with a group of other killers to murder Mick and attempts to rape Mick's restrained girlfriend when attacking Mick's home.
  • Desolation Game: Sergeant Atkin was Mick's superior in The Vietnam War and a fellow killer who helped mold him into a "professional" murderer. Agreeing to give a village scraps of food in exchange for being allowed to rape their women, Atkin has Mick join him in a series of assaults and both enjoy torturing their victims as they violate them. The two even shoot a couple of friendly soldiers who happen to witness their attacks. Teaching Mick the "head on a stick" technique by severing a man's spine, Atkin lets Mick torment and kill the paralyzed man. Accosted by the village elder for their murder of their own two soldiers, Atkin and Mick go on a spree raping and killing all the villagers they can before Atkin attempts to kill Mick for fear of him talking.
• Contested Sequel: The second film received mixed reviews. Variety said it wasn't as good as the first but was "still quite a ride". It also earned approximately $1 million more than the first worldwide.
• Critical Dissonance: Interestingly, this was actually one of the better reviewed torture porn movies, at 52% on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences collectively hated it, with it getting a rare F score on Cinema Score at the time of its release (It's American release, which came out on Christmas Day 2005, probably didn't help.) That said, audiences did eventually warm up to it in later years, with the film gaining a cult following since. Audiences on IMDB have rated the film a 6.2/10, which is more positive in comparison to it's F on Cinema Score.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Mick and the kangaroos. Animal cruelty aside, it's quite funny if you have that sense of humor.
• First Installment Wins: The first film made a bigger impression on the general public and is more remembered than the second.
• Harsher in Hindsight: An early scene has Liz and Kristy sending postcards back home. This will be the last thing their families ever hear from them.
• Heartwarming Moments: The kiss between Ben and Liz is quite sweet. He isn't entirely sure she likes him back, so you can tell he's ecstatic that she reciprocates. And it is quite cute the way she giggles and says "I was wondering what that would be like."
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The last we see of Ben is him being loaded onto a plane to testify in a trial. Nathan Phillips later stars in Snakes on a Plane where he's boarding a plane to testify in another murder trial.
  • During the DVD special features, the car is shown to still be able to drive after being wrecked for the sake of a scene. If you're familiar with the film Death Proof - where a man murders people using a 'death proof' stunt car - you'll chuckle that this movie is referenced in that.
• Intended Audience Reaction: It's been argued by some that the audience is supposed to feel disgust and horror at what the characters go through - which is why the first half of the film develops them.
• Misaimed Fandom: Disturbingly enough, more than a few xenophobic Australians think Mick has the right idea, never mind that he's killed plenty of his fellow Aussies in his bigoted crusade to keep his country pure and isn't exactly pure himself.
• Misaimed Marketing: Part of the funding for the movie came from the idea that it would have so much Scenery Porn, the Australian tourist agency would make more money off of all the people coming to Australia in order to see scenery like the movie. Um...
• Narm: Mick taunting Eve in slow motion.
  Mick: FFFFFFFIIIIIIIIIIRRRRE POOOOOOOOOOOOKKKKKKKKER?
• Narm Charm: The road trip montage over the credits in the first film. A little predictable and cheesy, but the friends are clearly having lots of fun and it feels realistic.
• Nausea Fuel: Liz gets her fingers casually lopped off by Mick's hunting knife.
• Never Live It Down: Liz will never live down not shooting Mick while he was down and thus getting herself killed.
  • Basically the case whenever someone has a means of killing him, especially when he's unconscious or otherwise incapacitated, and doesn't. Two Aborigines have him dead to rights by singing to incapacitate his evil spirit, but they think that's enough to have offed him, instead of putting several bullets in his head to make damn sure. And so he inflicts the punishment he should have received on them instead.
• Once Original, Now Common: The film was praised for being subversive at the time for killing off the obvious Final Girl first and having the male be spared. But when horror remakes started popping up in the late 2000s and subverting and deconstructing the genre even more - particularly Scream 4 and The Cabin in the Woods, this film's efforts don't look quite as daring. The film was also considered quite graphic for the time, as the Torture Porn genre was only just starting to emerge (the first Saw film was released just one year earlier, and Hostel came out the same year). These days, the violence in Wolf Creek can seem comparatively tame to other horror movies of its kind.
• Tear Jerker: After Liz is killed, Kristy wakes up in the spot where she left her. She calls out for Liz a couple of times but then realises that her friend won't be coming back.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The horrific violence inflicted on the protagonists is meant to make the viewers empathize with them, which works well with some viewers, but not with others. Many audience members just stop caring after all the violence they see. The fact that Mick Taylor constantly gets away with his crimes doesn't help.
  Roger Ebert: "I know, I know, my job as a critic is to praise the director for showing low budget filmmaking skills and creating a tense atmosphere and evoking emptiness and menace in the outback, blah, blah. But in telling a story like this, the better he is, the worse the experience. Perhaps his job as a director is to make a movie I can sit through without dismay."
• The Woobie: Kristy definitely, considering the amount of horror she has to put up with. Whereas Liz and Ben are just locked up, Kristy is implied to have been raped (her pants are down and there is blood on her legs) and personally tortured by Mick. Then when Liz is killed, Kristy has to run out onto the highway by herself.

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