CCFC Presents: WAKE IN FRIGHT (1971)

Name: CCFC Presents: WAKE IN FRIGHT (1971)
Start: 2025-03-26T20:00:00+13:00
Location: 610 Dominion Road, Balmoral, Auckland, New Zealand 1041

Schedule

Wed, 26 Mar, 2025 at 08:00 pm

UTC+13:00

Location

610 Dominion Road, Balmoral, Auckland, New Zealand 1041 | Auckland, AU

This March, Capitol Cinema Film Club brings Ted Kotcheff's feral Outback Classic WAKE IN FRIGHT to the big screen!
Ted Kotcheff, a Canadian, directed this adaptation of Australian journalist Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel. Englishman Gary Bond plays John Grant, a schoolteacher, who loses his mind in alarming fashion in a remote township in the sun-scorched and barren Outback. The film also stars character actor Donald Pleasance (best-known for the HALLOWEEN series) in a uniquely frightening role, as a vagrant alcoholic medical practitioner.
Filmed on-location in Broken Hill and Sydney, it was one of two Australian films nominated for the Grand Prix at the 24th Cannes Film Festival. Following the success of this film, Kotcheff would most famously go on to direct the original Rambo film FIRST BLOOD (1982), as well as hallowed '80s comedy item WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S (1989).
Shot on a budget of $700K, WAKE IN FRIGHT is considered one of Kotcheff's greatest films, and a singular example of Australia's independent filmmaking prowess. By the 1990s it had developed a cult reputation as Australia's great "lost film" because its master negative had gone missing, resulting in censored prints of degraded quality being used. Thankfully, in 2004, editor Anthony Buckley digitally remastered the film and five years later, it was re-released at Cannes. Now, it has been again remastered in 4K, resulting in an astonishing distillation of an almost-forgotten masterwork.
In his 1972 review for The New York Times, Roger Greenspun praised the film for its atmosphere "of general foreboding that crystalizes often enough into particular terror and that is not quite like anything else I can remember feeling at the movies. Certain science-fiction films come closest to it, especially those in which some evil alien presence has taken over a community that to all outward appearances remains normal—with only the slightest most fugitive hint that something somehow is hideously wrong."
Don't miss your chance to catch this cult classic on the big screen!
Wednesday 16 March, 8pm. Tickets just $13. See you there.