Wake In Fright (1971)

Directed by Ted Kotcheff

I cannot accept your premise, Socrates. Affectability... progress... are vanities spawned by fear. A vanity spawned by fear. The aim of what you call civilisation is a man in a smokin' jacket, whiskey and soda, pressing a bottom... button, to destro…

I cannot accept your premise, Socrates. Affectability... progress... are vanities spawned by fear. A vanity spawned by fear. The aim of what you call civilisation is a man in a smokin' jacket, whiskey and soda, pressing a bottom... button, to destroy a planet a billion miles away, kill a billion people he's never seen.

I am fairly notorious for falling asleep during the best films but I am surprised that I slept through the action of this wild ride. I was all in when Kai suggested that we watch this together. I had never heard of it before and he’s got good taste in these things. He’s also got nice arms and when he wrapped them around me, off to sleep I went. This morning, I picked up where I left off - right when things start to come completely unhinged for our schoolteacher hero John Grant. This is the tale of a seriously lost weekend - the kind that simply just appears; sucks you in as though you have no will; spills out like a pile of hot guts and leaves you forever altered (the experience of watching the film is kind of like that too). The kind where you live a lifetime in the course of a few days and then are deposited back as an alien in a familiar landscape. Doc Tydon (played by Donald Pleasence - from Halloween!!!), is the cultured savage, our Virgil, who takes John by the hand and leads him through the Inferno of Yabba. And in the final scene, as John returns to his post at Tiboonda, is that God himself sitting on the porch smiling?