ROGUE (2008)

Rogue (2008)

Actors: John Jarratt, Heather Mitchell, Barry Otto, Michael Vartan, Stephen Curry
Director: Greg McLean
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Language: English
Subtitles: English, Spanish
Region: 1 (U.S. and Canada only)
Number of discs: 1
Studio: Weinstein Company
Run Time: 99 minutes

Movie: * * ½
Disc: * * *

A not-bad horror movie by the director of Wolf Creek about a group of tourists being terrorised by a giant overgrown man-eating crocodile whilst on a boat cruise in the Australian wilderness. (Director McLean’s movies must be doing wonders for the Aussie tourism industry! Wolf Creek was about tourists being sadistically tortured by a psycho killer in the Outback . . .)

What makes Rogue better than anything you’d see on the SciFi Channel is the film’s decent production values plus astoundingly beautiful Australian scenery. Add to this a naturalistic approach instead of the over-top tongue-in-cheek approach of similarly themed efforts such as Lake Placid. The cast is also perfectly chosen: they are exactly the sort of people you’d typically see on a tourist cruise such as this instead of the Californian bronzed and gym-toned youths normally inhabiting Hollywood horror movies. Their reaction to their situation is also very human and while the entire plot may be far-fetched and ridiculous they make one believe in the characters’ predicament. Gore and violence are also mercifully toned down in favour of brooding atmosphere and actual scares.

THE DISC: Rogue may be just a low-budget fright fest for most but the rather long-ish “making of” feature on the disc (interestingly also directed by the film’s director) makes one appreciates how much effort still goes into films like these. It is well worth checking out if the film-making process interests you. One is also surprised at the scale of the logistic involved: crew and materials had to be flown in by helicopter to the film’s distant exotic locales for instance, an artificial island had to be actually built in the middle of a real lake and actors had to cope with temperatures in the 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) range.

WORTH IT? Titles released under the Dimension Extreme banner are usually low-budget crap, but Rogue is definitely a worth-see for horror fans.