WOLF CREEK (2005). I guess some people out there will want to spend Christmas Day watching a spinal cord get severed by an 18-inch Bowie knife. Unfortunately, they'll have to make it through about an hour's worth of nausea-inducing hand-held photography to get there. Australian Greg McLean in his debut feature takes the Saw philosophy of gratuitous sadism one notch higher by shooting the film's innocuous set-up with unsteadi-cam; when the mayhem gets started and the image settles down, it comes as a relief. Based on a "true" story that unfolds suspiciously like every slasher film ever made, Wolf Creek starts with two female British tourists and their Sydney guide driving cross-country through the Outback. They stop at the huge meteor crater of the title, their car breaks down, and an oafishly friendly local offers them help. Fill in the rest, but do note that McLean has some unexpected twists of the knife waiting. John Jarratt provides one of the few sympathetic characters as the good Samaritan, the Crocodile Dundee of our darkest nightmares. (99m)

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