We got a poster, now we have a trailer for Greg McLean’s Australian slasher-flick, Wolf Creek 2. The people behind the trailer must know what made the first film stick, because it’s got plenty of the returning main villain: John Jarratt’s crazy man-of-the-Outback, Mick.
Based on the trailer, Wolf Creek 2 will follow a similar structure to the original: innocent young people traveling around Australia’s Outback are having a good time until they run into Mick, and then the body count starts to rise. It looks like Mick will racking up a higher body count this time around as he wields a rifle, a bowie knife, and a big rig while mouthing off about “foreign vermin.”
McLean thrives when he takes cues from other classic horror films. The original Wolf Creek owes a lot to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre – young travelers in unfamiliar territory come across deranged locals who proceed to torment them. McLean’s follow up to Wolf Creek, 2007’s Rogue is an Australian flavoring of the Jaws series – substituting a crocodile for a shark. Likewise, Wolf Creek 2 seems to be carrying on the Chainsaw Massacre influence while also following in the footsteps of Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971) and Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher (1986) – both films feature a crazed antagonist (a truck-driver and a hitch-hiker, respectively) who spend their screentime stalking and terrorizing the respective protagonists. Mick looks to be taking up the crazed-stalker antagonist role, with Ryan Corr’s (Where the Wild Things Are, Not Suitable for Children) Paul as his victim.
Wolf Creek 2 opens in”cinemas” February 20th. No word yet on a release date for American “theaters.”