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Stale Popcorn (UK)
September 30, 2007
*EXCLUSIVE* [Guest Review] - ROGUE
By Gazz
SPOILERS!
I’ve known this guy since 2003 when we both took on jobs at Northern Rock (and we’re sure as shit glad we’re not still employed there right now with the current crisis I assure you!). I disappeared back into the police force briefly and he fought till his knuckles bled and hung detached from his hands to get the break into movie production that he felt he’d studied for and earned (He’ll tell you more about that below!) with Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek follow-up, Rogue.
When the film was first delayed I found out about it ahead of the curve through him and reported it on our old stompin ground. When the film’s official Jaws-esque poster was released, I found out about it’s existence through him. When the film was put back AGAIN last week, as reported by Wyverex, I threw out an e-mail to this particular person asking what he felt was the reason for this delay, was the film actually any good, is it heading straight to DVD, would he feel like writing a review explaining his connection to the film if his identity was protected and so on and so forth.
What follows is less a review and more a personal attack on the ratings system, movie distribution etc. but it gives an insight and sign of hope towards people, like myself, who once had this film high up on their radar!
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Gazz and me go way back and he was the guy that I used to attend film festivals with when we could. At one such festival I saw Greg McLean’s awesome Wolf Creek and hung around for the Q+A afterwards, getting the chance to ask how I could get into movie production in terms of ’special effects’ departments. His advice was quite helpful to say the least because at the next festival, I was able to sit down and watch Wolf Creek once more and get to take part in another Q+A afterwards too. This time I explained to Mr McLean that his advice had been most helpful as I now had a job out in Australia with **** ***’s ******** ******** [name deleted by me - Gazz!] as a sort of “semi-apprenticeship”. He quickly congratulated me and told me he’d see me out there as this particular company had the contract for the ‘effects’ on his next movie.
And that, weirdly enough, is how I got my first job assisting with the ‘creature effects’ on Rogue - running between actual hellish location shooting in the Northern Territory of Australia and “studio shooting” in a warehouse in Maidstone in Melbourne where a fair majority of the “island” shots were done, in a man made lake the fantastic art department were responsible for making the rocks and trees out to resemble those in the real Territory location shots that had been captured.
For those who don’t know or who aren’t aware of the plot, Rogue follows the exploits of an American called Pete, played by Michael Vartan of Alias fame, who works as a travel writer. Whilst compiling a report on the much increased tourist industry in the Northern Territory of Australia, he’s coaxed into taking a river cruise led by Kate (the stunning Radha Mitchell who you’ll know from Pitch Black, Man on Fire and Melinda & Melinda), the beautiful local tour guide. Once down river though, their boat is rammed by something from below, and the tour and the lives of Pete, Kate and all the other tourists aboard the boat is immediately put at risk when they become stranded on a tiny mud island that slowly disappears beneath the weight of their bodies as the night draws in and the tide starts to rise. Soon they all come to realise that they’re being preyed on by a huge saltwater crocodile, and have very little chance of survival seeing as they are stuck in one of the most remote places in the world.
This has always been Greg McLean’s “baby” and he told us as much when production opened and he come to speak to each department. The script was one of the first he had written, long before Wolf Creek, and it has pretty much stayed the same over the decades (One of the only major changes being a role that was created specifically for John Jarrett - Mick from Wolf Creek!). He also went into this using the success and acclaim of his first movie to wager that whichever company took this project on had to agree that nobody could tell him who to cast, the movie would shoot in Australia and not in some American studio greenscreened to look like Oz and, finally, he got final cut. The Weinstein Company said yes to all three of those conditions.
I’ve seen Rogue twice now in two different forms. Once was a relatively long time ago when production was done and it was screened for the crew in less than cinema-style conditions (don’t ask!). I loved it from start to finish. I genuinely thought it was less of a Jaws-rip-off and more of an actual rival to that film in terms of set-up, execution and outright scares! I’ve seen it again since with various cuts made and a different style of pacing with a preview audience here in Australia and I found it equally as good and I’m not just saying that because I was involved in the production in a relatively minor way!
This film is not to be written off as some sort of B-movie or B-movie homage. I think that would be to severely underestimate the film itself. It’s the sort of film that takes the concepts of such a B-movie, for example - the giant crocodile eating a load of human fodder, and elevates it above and beyond the norm. It’s on par with what John Carpenter did in the seventies with Assault on Precinct 13 or Joss Whedon did for the B-movie sci-fi picture with Serenity.
This isn’t Lake Placid and I’ve e-mailed Gazz twice now to assure him that all connections in his mind to that film need to be disabled. Lake Placid IS a B-movie romp, playing up the comedy and playing down the scares. McLean’s Rogue is the exact opposite; there’s humour contained within but it’s a scary film first and foremost. In fact the ‘horror’ aspects in this film are pretty bloody brutal all in all. The creature effects, which I had some hand in truth be told, are nothing short of fantastic, especially for the budget that the whole production was working off.
I’ve read reports from people who “say” they’ve seen this film who claim it takes ages to get going and that it doesn’t deliver after the build up. You can say what the hell you like about this film and you can attack the effects or some of the attempts at humour or whatever doesn’t meet your particular specifications, but the one thing you cannot say about this film is that it has a slow build-up. Out of everyone I spoke to after a preview screening in Melbourne, they all spoke highly of the same thing; McLean introduces a wealth of plot and character that makes us give a shit, in the smallest amount of time possible, knowing full well that people have come to the film for the giant crocodile!
Gazz asked me why this film is getting mishandled the way it is and whether the rumours are actually true that this film is going to get dropped onto DVD (much like Lake Placid did by Fox, strangely enough, everywhere outside of the US). I genuinely don’t know what the hell The Weinstein Company are playing at in all honesty. It’s not as if they’re looking down at a film which is going to prove a hard ‘market’ or have to think about the best ‘opening season’ for this film (the best ‘opening season’ just passed them by and they let it go because this would have cleaned up at the tail end of the summer season this year!). It’s a giant croc movie with major cult appeal and a built-in horror crowd coming from Wolf Creek. Master a great trailer two or three months ahead of it’s release, saturate the internet and TV with snappy spots and there you go, your jobs done! Above all else, the Weinstein boys know in their heart of hearts how to take hold of a film with a B-movie heart and a desire to transcend it. They did it twice over with great success via Kill Bill Volume 1 and Kill Bill Volume 2.
I know that McLean has struggled with the ratings board over in the US regarding certain gory aspects and he’s fought hard for his own corner - it does appear that showing a penis being sliced off is okay (if you’re Quentin Tarantino’s bitch-boy!) but a high-build-up of tension with a short burst of gore to conclude it, is totally unacceptable! And a lot of us are beginning to wonder whether that is having anything to do with the delay as he hands the film back and forth to censors? But the film has previewed a good few times here in Australia and it’s always been to positive audience reaction the majority of the time.
I’m pretty certain that the film will not end up debuting on DVD outside of America (after all, the Weinstein’s even managed to find a brief big-screen release for Cursed!) but, at the end of the day, I would have said the same thing about a lot of Disney/Dimension/Miramax flicks that have disappeared after repeated delays only to turn up as ‘Blockbuster Exclusives’ a year or so later.
This film though is capable of really entertaining the crap out of you and turning into a word-of-mouth horror sensation just like Wolf Creek… if only they’d let you see the fucking thing!
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WOW! This hasn’t dampened my desire to see this film at all, although I am doubting his comments that it is a “rival” to Jaws. You just know it’s going to get thrown away as a direct-to-DVD movie don’t you? I’m going to start looking for the Australian DVD release because I think that’s going to happen before it even sees the cinema here in the UK (which, ironically enough, is the exact opposite of what happened with McLean’s first movie!).
Rogue allegedly has a US release of Feb 2008!
© 2007 Stale Popcorn
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