A real curio from the early days of the Aussie revival: a proposed pilot for a tv series which runs at a TV hour, features no dialogue, and is a chase horror film – a killer (Norman Yemm!) living in the bush with rats who chases women who pass through: Briony Behets in a pre credit sequence (she was also terrorised in The Long Weekend) and Carla Hoogeveen.
Hoogeveen is very sexy in that 70s Australian film way, totally objectified, showing lots of leg and cleavage, and she does well enough in a part that mostly consists of her being chased. Yemm gets to act insane, there is a yucky dream sequence where Hoogeveen is tied up naked while Yemm comes into the room naked with a skull over his privates – and a genuinely shocking scene where Hoogeveen is eaten by rats.
Director Terry Bourke sounds from the commentary to have been a little bundle of energy, a current affairs reported turned filmmaker whose ability to do deals was greater than his filmmaking ability. And from all accounts most of his films were crap, but this film is surprisingly good – he deserves some points for making a film without dialogue, which does have effective moments and a relentless feeling of terror, thirty years before Wolf Creek.
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