Wolf Creek 2

Plot

In North Western Australia, highway patrol officers Gary Bulmer (Shane Connor) and trainee Brian O'Connor (Ben Gerrard) are parked by an outback highway and are desperate to meet a quota for speeding tickets. Mick Taylor (John Jarratt), a pig hunter, drives past going under the speed limit and they pull him over, claiming he's going over the speed limit. After belittling and insulting Mick, the two officers give him a speeding ticket and an order to get rid of his truck. Annoyed at their rudeness and arrogance, Mick promptly uses his sniper rifle to splatter O'Connor's head as the officers drive away, causing the cruiser to crash in a gully. Despite Bulmer's pleas, Mick breaks his leg, stabs him with a bowie knife and places the fatally wounded officer back in the car before dousing it with petrol and setting it alight. Mick departs, leaving Bulmer to die in the resulting explosion.

A young German couple, Rutger (Phillipe Klaus) and Katarina (Shannon Ashlyn), hitchhike from Sydney to Wolf Creek Crater and camp nearby. In the middle of the night, Mick is driving by and sees their tent in the distance. He offers them a lift to a caravan park so they do not get charged for camping in a national park. When Rutger insists on declining his offer, Mick loses his temper and stabs Rutger in the back. He then ties down Katarina and prepares to rape her, but a wounded Rutger comes back and battles Mick. He is eventually overpowered and decapitated. Horrified by her boyfriend's death and the notion of spending "a few long, fun months" with Mick, Katarina faints. She later wakes up to see Mick cutting up Rutger's body to feed to his dogs. She flees into the bush and Mick pursues her in his truck.

Paul (Ryan Corr), an English tourist, is driving along the highway and stops for Katarina standing in the road. He picks her up, but Mick follows them. He shoots at Paul, but accidentally kills Katarina instead when Paul ducks under the shot, much to Paul's horror and Mick's dismay. Paul then drives off, dumping Katarina's body and covering it with just a sleeping bag at daybreak. He then reaches a highway, but realising he is off course and has low fuel, tries to flag down a truck in the distance. He soon realises that Mick is driving the truck, having killed the original driver. After a long chase, Mick nudges Paul's vehicle at a cliff side, sending it rolling down into a valley, then sends the truck hurtling down into Paul's vehicle which explodes as he barely escapes. Exhausted and dehydrated, Paul passes out near an outback cottage and is given food and shelter by elderly couple Jack (Gerard Kennedy) and Lil (Annie Byron). They plan to take Paul to the nearest town after he has eaten, but Mick finds the house, steals one of Jack's guns and shoots Jack and Lil dead. Paul then flees again, while Mick follows him on Jack's horse. He catches Paul hiding in the grassland and knocks him out.

Paul wakes up in Mick's dungeon, zip-tied to a chair. Mick is furious at Paul for his role in Katarina's death and prepares to torture him, but Paul pacifies him with his "English wit" by narrating bar jokes and leading Mick in drinking songs that he claims he learned at boarding school. Mick's torture for Paul consists of a ten question quiz about Australian culture and history, with a promise to free him if he answers five of them correctly. However if Paul gets a question wrong, he loses a finger. Paul answers the first two questions and reveals that he is a history major. After he gets the next question 'wrong', Mick (incensed by Paul's knowledge) grinds off one of his fingers with a sander (the answer Paul provided was technically correct, Mick just had a different interpretation of it). During the next question, Paul tricks Mick into cutting his other hand free by deliberately answering incorrectly (and losing another finger), then grabs a nearby hammer and clubs Mick with it. He then flees through the tunnels, pursued by an injured Mick. Paul finds several decayed corpses of Mick's victims and a severely emaciated woman (Jordan Cowan) woken by him begs to be freed. Eventually he finds an exit, but notices a sheet on the ground directly in front of it. Lifting it up, he finds a Punji stick trap underneath and considers trying to jump over it. He hears someone coming and hides in a corner, assuming that it is Mick coming to get him. When the person who approaches walks past the corner, Paul then knocks the person into the trap with the claw hammer, killing them. But when he looks down to see what he thinks is Mick's corpse, he discovers it was just the woman he encountered earlier. Immediately afterwards, Mick finds and subdues Paul. After declaring himself "the winner" and lecturing how "It's up to my kind to wipe your kind out", Mick head-butts him unconscious.

When he wakes up, Paul finds himself on a footpath in a small town, dressed only in his underpants and with wounds across his body. He finds a note near him which reads "Loser", and he is soon discovered by the police.

A series of title cards reveal that despite reporting Mick to the police, Paul was held as a suspect in various unsolved murders in the Wolf Creek area. During the investigation, he suffered a complete mental breakdown and was deported back to the UK and placed in full-time care at Ashworth Hospital, Merseyside. The film ends in a manner similar to the previous film, with Mick walking off into the outback with his rifle.

Cast

Production

Despite the first film's success, McLean chose to begin work on the film Rogue rather than develop a sequel. Later he said he regretted that decision: 'If I'd known then what I know now about how long it would take to get this up, I'd probably have said yes to a sequel earlier.'

In 2010, McLean announced that he was developing a sequel and confirmed that Jarratt would be returning to portray Mick Taylor.

Geoffrey Edelsten signed on to invest in the production of Wolf Creek 2, but later withdrew his support of the film and alleged that McLean had misled him into believing that he would not be the largest single private investor. When the funding deadline had passed, Emu Creek Pictures sent Edelsten's Millennium Management a statutory demand for A$4.923 million. Edelsten asked the Supreme Court of Australia to set aside the demand so he could seek further legal recourse. McLean and Emu Creek Pictures denied they had misled Edelsten, and said they had shown Edelsten documents that clearly set out his A$5 million share of the A$5.2  million support expected from private investors. The funding plan specified that any shortfall from that level would be made up by Screen Australia and the South Australian Film Corporation (SAFC).

Filming was set to begin in 2011, but the loss of Edelsten's backing delayed the production. McLean risked losing the funds from the government bodies if he could not find another private investor. Early in 2012 the SAFC withdrew its commitment but recommitted in September to the tune of A$400,000, enabling production to resume. Filming began in 2012 and continued into early 2013.

While developing the script, McLean chose to focus on Mick Taylor as the character was "the most interesting thing about the first movie." McLean says that the second story, like the first, is based on true events, a point he said would be "pretty obvious when [viewers] see the film".

Box office

Wolf Creek 2 was released theatrically in Australia on 20 February 2014, taking over $1,510,578 at the box office, making it the number one film in its opening weekend. The film grossed $4,164,799 in Australia. The film also opened in the United States on 17 April 2014 and grossed $21,527,854, it collected $4,419,947 in other territories for a worldwide total of $30,112,600.

Critical reception

Initial response at the Venice Film Festival was mostly positive. The Hollywood Reporter summarized the story thus: 'A psychopathic serial killer and his knife carve out an edge-of-seat gorefest that follows safely in the tracks of its predecessor.' Variety's review commented that the film was "neither as striking nor as fundamentally scary as its predecessor" but was "still quite a ride, and one that genre-inclined distribs should have no qualms about hitching." Likewise, Norman Gator of The Sydney Morning Herald gave the film four out of four stars, calling it "Perhaps the greatest Aussie flick ever made. I hope to hell there'll be a third one."

The film currently has a "rotten" score of 48% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 48 reviews with an average rating of 5.6 out of 10. The critical consensus states "After a strong start, Wolf Creek 2 devolves into an unnecessary – and disappointingly predictable – sequel." The film also has a score of 44 out of 100 on Metacritic based on 13 critics indicating "Mixed or average reviews."