★★★½ ”Kotcheff’s masterpiece (he later did First Blood), it orchestrates landscape, music, demonic faces, and lots of blood, sweat, and vomit into a stark bacchanalia of men having fun.” —Peter Keough, The Phoenix
(1971) dir Ted Kotcheff w/Donald Pleasance, Gary Bond, Chips Rafferty [114 min] Alongside MAD MAX and WALKABOUT, WAKE IN FRIGHT is widely acknowledged as one of the seminal films in the development of modern Australian cinema. Directed by Ted Kotcheff (Rambo: First Blood), the film tells the story of a British schoolteacher’s descent into personal demoralization at the hands of drunken, deranged derelicts while stranded in a small town in outback Australia.
WAKE IN FRIGHT is lauded for its stark and uncompromising vision by champions such as Roger Ebert who said WAKE IN FRIGHT is “powerful, genuinely shocking and rather amazing,” and celebrated musician/screenwriter Nick Cave, who said the film is “the best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence.”
Believed to be lost for many years, WAKE IN FRIGHT was restored at Sydney’s AtLab Deluxe with the aid of the National Film and Sound Archives of Australia after an exhaustive decade-long search for original film elements. Virtually unseen in the U.S., the film is ripe for rediscovery and returns to cinemas in this brand new, restored 35mm print thanks to the mad geniuses at Drafthouse Films.
“Wake in Fright is the closest a movie can get to a primal scream.” — Rex Reed, New York Observer
“It’s simultaneously terrifying and hilarious, a full-on shotgun blast to the face of rediscovered 1970s weirdness, something like finding out that there’s a classic Peckinpah film you’ve never seen, or that Wes Craven and Bernardo Bertolucci got drunk in Sydney one weekend and decided to make a movie together.” — Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com
Wake in Fright
New Restoration!
New 35mm Print!
Buy Tickets Brattle Passes Accepted
(1971) dir Ted Kotcheff w/Donald Pleasance, Gary Bond, Chips Rafferty [114 min]
Alongside MAD MAX and WALKABOUT, WAKE IN FRIGHT is widely acknowledged as one of the seminal films in the development of modern Australian cinema. Directed by Ted Kotcheff (Rambo: First Blood), the film tells the story of a British schoolteacher’s descent into personal demoralization at the hands of drunken, deranged derelicts while stranded in a small town in outback Australia.
WAKE IN FRIGHT is lauded for its stark and uncompromising vision by champions such as Roger Ebert who said WAKE IN FRIGHT is “powerful, genuinely shocking and rather amazing,” and celebrated musician/screenwriter Nick Cave, who said the film is “the best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence.”
Believed to be lost for many years, WAKE IN FRIGHT was restored at Sydney’s AtLab Deluxe with the aid of the National Film and Sound Archives of Australia after an exhaustive decade-long search for original film elements. Virtually unseen in the U.S., the film is ripe for rediscovery and returns to cinemas in this brand new, restored 35mm print thanks to the mad geniuses at Drafthouse Films.