Blu-ray, DVD Release: Wake in Fright

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Jan. 15, 2013
Price: DVD $27.97, Blu-ray $29.97
Studio: Drafthouse/RLJ

A schoolteacher gets waylaid in the Australian outback and takes a journey into the heart of darkness in the 1971 thriller Wake in Fright, a “lost” cult film that was “recovered” and restored before making a return to the theatrical repertory circuit in the fall of 2012.

Wake in Fright tells the story of a British schoolteacher’s descent into personal demoralization at the hands of the deranged, hard-drinking residents of a remote Australian town. John Grant (Gary Bond, Anne of the Thousand Days) teaches at a tiny school in the outback. On his way to Sydney to catch a vacation flight, he stops in a rural mining town, where he is reluctantly drawn into the macho antics of the local men. After losing his money in the gambling game two-up, he is taken on a drunken and brutal kangaroo hunt with three of the beer-guzzling louts – a horrifying ordeal that culminates in a shattering sexual assault.

Directed by Ted Kotcheff (First Blood), Wake in Fright co-stars Donald Pleasence (Fantastic Voyage) and Australian actors Jack Thompson (Breaker Morant) and Chips Rafferty (Mutiny on the Bounty).

The R-rated Wake in Fright had its world premiere at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, where it was nominated for a Palme d’Or. It was retitled Outback and hurried into a few theaters across the U.S. with minimal advertising support, where it barely lasted a week before it was pulled from circulation. For over three decades, the film materials were thought to be lost, until the movie’s persistent cinematographer unearthed the original negative elements in Pennsylvania in canisters marked for imminent destruction. Today, the film is widely acknowledged as one of the seminal movies of modern Australian cinema (alongside Mad Max and Walkabout).

Bonus features on the DVD and Blu-ray include the following: