Typically, I think horror movies represent the largest chunk of misused change thrown around by the studios. With the introduction of CGI and the omission of good ol’ fashioned rubber suits, guts and gore horror took a turn down a road I had no intention of following. Even before then the best of the nostalgic films did little for me. Poltergeist just seemed stupid (all of the sequels included), most Stephen King adaptations weren’t scary but stupid instead, and don’t even get me started on those stupid Freddy Krueger, Mike Myers and Jason Voorhees flicks – every one of them a waste of my time.
Jaws stands above as one of my favorite drama or horror films because it managed to do one thing: instill fear of the unknown. Which is exactly why I found myself like the Australian made Rogue. Like Jaws, the predatory beast of Rogue doesn’t make a full-fledged appearance until the final 20 minutes of the movie. The director will throw the audience the occasional glimpse of an appendage, the unexpected devouring of a hapless mammal or the ever-ominous perspective of the predator – but they hold off on showing the audience the very thing which they fear.
Rogue follows a collection of tourists on a Crocodile sighting tour in the far reaches of the outback. You have all the typical tourists accounted for, the lone American, the nuclear family, a conservative couple, some old folks. It’s all there. After some truly beautiful shots of the outback (honestly it there are a few sequences that feel ripped from a Discovery Channel or National Geographic program), the tourists begin making their way back to land. But wouldn’t you know it? A rescue flare is sighted in the distance leading them to turn around and head deeper into the forbidding wilderness – where it all begins. Before they know it their boat is capsized by the powerful thrust of an underwater menace and the soggy survivors find themselves stranded on an ever shrinking island in the middle of a rising tide.
Screw Lake Placid. That movie was a piece of absolute tripe. It was more a comedy than anything else. But Rogue, using the Jaws playbook, takes all the right twists and turns. It never attempts to indulge too much in piss poor character building which many horror writers try to do these days, because they recognize they inherent shallowness of the genre. Instead Rogue keeps your intention with an intense score and non-stop action and suspense. The characters never make stupid attempts at wandering off on their own in the woods. No one ever stands too close to the water making stupid taunts. Rogue avoids the pitfalls of the modern horror film.
When we do finally see the reptilian behemoth behind the tourists’ plight it’s done rather conservatively. Considering they had to use CGI (because building a 50+ foot crocodile out of rubber is just impractical) they keep the gigantor in the dark as much as possible and keep its movements appropriately slow and meaningful. Well, slow until the thing decides to charge the main character.
Radha Mitchell and Michael Vartan play the two protagonists. Radha, the outback tour guide, never once goes over the top. I mean for a horror film she gave the genre a better performance than it could ever have deserved. The same goes for Michael Vartan. As the more charismatic and younger of the tourists, he keeps his head and spearheads the effort to get the survivors off of the muddy hill and away from the crocodile.
I didn’t expect anything from this film. I’d heard from a friend that it was a surprisingly good underdog horror film. I shrugged it off – after all, a “surprisingly good horror film” is biz lingo for not as sucky as the rest, but still sucky. But Rogue broke that formula. At a tight 92 minutes it sports good direction, acting and plot.
Honestly, this puts to shame any and all of the “giant animal” horror films of the last 10 years. It really makes me hope that the Australian crew has more good ideas up their khaki, many-pocketed safari sleeves.
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