Rural Terror | Offscreen
"The Reflecting Skin" is the first film by the British director Philip Ridley (who made only three films in twenty years). A creepy, dreamlike journey into the magical universe of childhood, set in a disquieting and unreal decor of rural America. A young Viggo Mortensen can be seen in one of his first major roles.
"Wake in Fright" by Ted Kotcheff ("First Blood") is a reference film of the Ozploitation of the 1970's (Australian exploitation cinema) that made us discover directors like Peter Weir and George Miller. A lost masterpiece that ventures into the hellish Australian bush, where human savagery gets rewritten to a hallucinatory trance rhythm, somewhere halfway between Kafka and a documentary.
The Reflecting Skin
Seth, a boy in a desolate rural town in fifties America, has a vivid imagination. He has dificulty to seperate reality from fantasy, until one of his friends is found murdered... "Stand by Me" meets "Blue Velvet" in this first film by painter-writer Philip Ridley.
Wake in Fright
A school teacher from Sidney finds himself stranded in an outback town. A disturbing, nightmarish descent into the Australian heart of darkness, drenched in beer and violence, with an excellent Donald Pleasance.