Australia... it's a vast, beautiful, welcoming country. It's also full to bursting with things that can kill you, if the big screen is to be believed. Inspired by Mia Wasikowska's plucky 1,700-mile trek across the Outback in Tracks, we flag up the traps and tropes she should watch out for.



(Un)Natural Phenomena

Exotic wildlife proliferates Down Under, most of it deceptively lethal. Witness the baby stolen by a dingo in horrifying Meryl Streep-starrer A Cry In The Dark (1988). The same â€“ real â€“ tragedy loosely inspired Razorback, a mullet-tastic 1984 horror about a giant marauding pig, directed by Highlander's Russell Mulcahy (mooted tagline: 'There Can Only Be Oink'). The less said about the ballet-dancing were-roos of The Marsupials: The Howling III (1987), the better.

Much more convincing is the giant CG crocodile munching Radha Mitchell's boat tour group (ex-Neighbours actors constitute an Outback peril all of their own) in 2007's Rogue, among them future stars Sam Worthington and â€“ yes â€“ young Mia herself. Perhaps wisely, the croc gets even less screentime than Worthington.

This isn't the only unseen menace. Burgeoning sexuality is as much to blame as brute nature for the disappearance of several Victorian schoolgirls in Peter Weir's Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975). Dubbed "Picnic At Hanging Cock", it's often considered the seminal Outback film, but only by people who haven't seen the awesome Long Weekend (1978).



Written by Everett De Roche â€“ the chief architect of the Ozploitation genre, who passed away in April aged 67 â€“ and loved by Quentin Tarantino, Long Weekend is an object lesson in how not to survive the wilds. Against a backdrop of random bird attacks and nuclear tests, an arguing couple head to a beach nobody's heard of to shoot/eat/run over a huge variety of animals while being extravagantly horrible to each other. Nature, needless to say, takes exception and their eerie, inevitable downfall plays out to a soundtrack of electronic cicadas and screaming seacows (look it up).

SEE ALSO: The Reef (2010), Dark Age (1987), Walkabout (1976)

Road warriors

Because everything's so damn far away, Aussies need to drive. They don't, however, need to form gangs of murderous, sexually ambiguous highway marauders, but what can you do? From Weir's The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), about a small town whose residents cause auto-accidents for their own nefarious ends, to the junkyard concentration camps of Dead-End Drive-In (1986), there's an entire subgenre devoted to petrol-headed psychopathy.

Among the more refined efforts is Road Games (1981), another brilliant De Roche script. Stacy Keach stars as the Shakespeare-quoting Quid, steering a road train full of meat across the Nullabor Plain with only a dingo for company. Quid thinks he's on the trail of a serial killer preying on young women â€“ Jamie Lee Curtis among them â€“ but it's possible he's just watched too many movies. De Roche and director Richard Franklin certainly have, and the result is a witty Hitchcock tribute on wheels.



Daddy of all the drive-time desperadoes is the Mad Max trilogy. Set in a near-future so merciless even Mel Gibson's avenger-turned-scavenger seems heroic, 1979's part one introduces several colourfully named bandits who don't quite live up to their billings â€“ bonkers biker The Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne), for example, barely clips a nail. Meanwhile Nightrider (Vincent Gil), who was "born with a steering wheel in his hand", also dies that way, bursting into girly tears as his "fuel-injected suicide machine" fulfils its messy destiny.

In the all-action, post-apocalyptic sequel, human life has deteriorated into a death race, and the chief antagonist is Wez (Commando's Vernon Wells, also "Bruce" in 1990's The Shrimp On The Barbie, stereotype fans). A Mohawked maniac so tough he wears arseless chaps â€“ which must really chafe â€“ Wez comes to embody the ultimate melding of man and machine when Max parks a truck in his face.

SEE ALSO: Road Train (2010), Running On Empty (1982), Stone (1974)

Ocker psychopaths

The Outback is a place of extremes â€“ and extreme behaviours. It's also suffered its fair share of atrocities, most of which have been subsumed into genre cinema. Based on real murders, and offering about as little fun as you can have at the flicks, Justin Kurzel's shocking Snowtown (2011) is set in a desolate Adelaide suburb full of dealers, rapists and paedophiles. Indeed, the residents are so dysfunctional that local geezer John Bunting (Daniel Henshall) seems like an upstanding member of the community â€“ until he starts burying people in barrels.



Storm Warning (2007) is a livelier affair, although it still manages to make everything look freezing. Nodding to the crazed hillbillies of Wrong Turn (2004) et al, it follows a yuppie couple stranded in an island farmhouse, then turns super-savage when the residents come home. "To catch a mad dog, you must think like a mad dog," decides heroine Nadia Fares, before booby-trapping her own body in a way no right-thinking canine would ever consider.

Inspired by the terrible crimes of Ivan Milat and Bradley John Murdoch, Greg Mclean's Wolf Creek (2005), Greg Mclean's Wolf Creek (2005) spins a (fabricated) tale so upsetting, it almost tips into torture porn. Crucially, it never quite does, because of the time we spend getting to know its three backpacker protagonists before they meet jocular "ocker" Mick Taylor (John Jarrett, from Rogue and Picnic).

A grinning, gone-to-seed Crocodile Dundee-alike (he even borrows Dundee's "that's not a knife" gag), Taylor has wandered the wilderness so long they can't tell whether he's eccentric or unhinged. The film spends an excruciating age playing the is-he-or-isn't-he game before deciding, show-stoppingly, that he definitely is, a trick the forthcoming sequel will have difficulty replicating.

SEE ALSO: Coffin Rock (2009), Dying Breed (2008), Night Of Fear (1973)

Lawless locals

A vein of lawlessness runs deep though Outback cinema, even if everyone's (justifiably) sick of convict jokes. "I will civilise this land," swears floundering policeman Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) in The Proposition (2005), an Aussie Western set at the country's brutal birth. Fat chance, is the film's response. Though 100 years have passed, magnificent noir Mystery Road (out August 22) is no more optimistic. Everyone's on the grog, on the make, or on the game â€“ even the coppers.



Fortress (1985), by De Roche again, follows a group of kidnapped schoolchildren who turn Lord Of The Flies-style feral on their captors. You haven't seen lost innocence until you've watched a group of grubby tykes tearing men (including Vernon Wells) in knock-off Disney masks to pieces. At least Turkey Shoot (1984) proposes a solution: a prison island where captives are hunted to the death by tooled-up guards â€“ and their pet werewolf! Like Orwell's 1984 rewritten by a horny teen, it's so feverishly mental you'll feel like you dreamed it.

But the worst Outback nightmare of all remains Wake In Fright (1971), dubbed "the best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence" by Nick Cave. Directed by First Blood's Ted Kotcheff, and featuring horrible (real) footage of a kangaroo shoot, it shows teacher Gary Bond's swift descent into savagery on an ill-advised country sojourn. Thick with spilt beer and vomit, sudden violence and endless, dripping disappointment, it's a sweaty arm wrestle of a movie where everyone loses.

Until its recent restoration, Wake In Fright was lost for many years â€“ probably by the Tourist Board. It's been compared to John Boorman's American masterpiece Deliverance (1972), but there's a crucial difference. In Deliverance, the violence is sudden, almost allegorical, a terrible anomaly. In Wake in Fright, it's simply a way of life.

SEE ALSO: Jindabyne (2006), Mad Dog Morgan (1976), Ned Kelly (1970)

Tracks is out in UK cinemas now.

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