One of the most exciting cinematic rediscoveries of the last few years is now available to anyone with a Netflix streaming account, thanks to the splintered nature of modern film distribution. I'm referring to the unearthing of Ted Kotcheff's 1971 film Wake in Fright, an Australian-American coproduction that is surely among the bleakest films I've ever seen. And I've seen Salò, Grave of the Fireflies and Nil by Mouth.

The story of Wake in Fright is very simple. At the end of the school year, John Grant, a teacher at a one-room schoolhouse in the Australian outback, leaves the remote town in which he's stationed and does his best to get back to Sydney. He gets waylaid, though, in the even more remote (and fictional) town of Bundanyabba, where he soon falls into alcohol- and violence-fueled dissolution. He loses all sense of propriety, all his morals and all hope of ever getting home.

I won't reveal the ending (though it's more than 40 years old, this still somewhat obscure film has been reintroduced into circulation only within the last two years). But suffice it to say that even Grant's last-ditch attempt to escape his own personal hell is unsuccessful.


The story of Wake in Fright's rediscovery and rerelease is far more complex. Made with a small budget for United Artists, the film was released (in some locations under the title Outback) to generally favorable reviews. Even some critics prone to moralizing viewed the film positively, despite its harrowing depictions of violence and vicious alcoholism. Wake in Fright achieved little success in the U.S., UK and Australia, but it was greeted more warmly in France. It vanished quickly from most theaters.

For some reason, I had the urge last weekend to revisit one of the most gloriously, gleefully preposterous films that I've ever seen: The 2003 sci-fi/disaster film The Core. I am happy to report that it does not disappoint — by which I mean that it remains profoundly silly. This is a quality I admire immensely.

Very little about The Core is not profoundly silly. Its premise, after all, is that a proverbial ragtag crew of mismatched oddballs can "restart" the flow of the molten metal at the center of the Earth. That molten metal has stopped moving, you see, quite possibly as a result of nefarious, government-funded experiments by one of the crew, the egotistical scientist Dr. Conrad Zimsky.

Under the guidance of another crackpot scientist who just happens to have figured out how to blast through solid rock with a beam of light, government forces construct, in just a couple of months, a subway-like vehicle that can withstand the intense heat and pressure at the Earth's core. This is because the vehicle is shielded by "unobtainium," a recently synthesized material that conveniently becomes stronger as the temperature to which it is subjected climbs.