Review: Fortress (1985)

Rachel Ward is a small country town teacher with a class of kids of all ages. They are set upon by a group of masked robbers (Peter Hehir, David Bradshaw, Vernon Wells, and Roger Stephen) who spend much of the film chasing after and terrorising them. However, the teacher and her students eventually decide to try and turn the tables. Wendy Playfair (who played an unlikely criminal on TV’s “Prisoner”) plays an elderly victim, whilst amongst the kids we find Sean Garlick, Rebecca Rigg, Beth Buchanan, and a young Asher Keddie. Terry Donovan appears at the end as a cop.

Everyone has one. It stays with you forever, even if the minute details may escape you the effect it had on you lingers. Perhaps it was something you saw at 3AM in the morning. Perhaps like me, you saw it as a kid. We all have that one film that we saw once many moons ago and it has somehow stuck in your mind all this time. Having not seen it in the years since you might even question if it wasn’t a movie but a nightmare. Well, at least in my case I knew it wasn’t a nightmare because this 1985 Arch Nicholson (the dull croc film “Dark Age”) film was also witnessed by my older brother. Still, I saw it once when I was about 8 and hadn’t seen it again until now in 2019. Scripted by Ozploitation veteran Everett De Roche (“Patrick”, “Razorback”, “Roadgames”, “Frog Dreaming”), I must say looking at it from a 2019 perspective, this is a pretty damn dark film to have seen in my pre-teen days (Hell, I refused to watch horror movies until I was about 11 when I saw “Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare” at the drive-ins in 1991. It’s amazing to think that stupidity was my first, but anyway…) I have a long-standing fear of people wearing masks, especially normally innocuous-seeming masks (Don’t even get me started on clowns, thank you Tim Curry!). This film is the exact reason for that phobia. How in the hell was I allowed to watch what is pretty much a mixture of “Desperate Hours”, “The Goonies”, “Lord of the Flies”, and “Deliverance” at such a young age?

The film is unsettling from moment one, with particularly foreboding music score by Danny Beckermann (“Dark Age”), and an ominously creaking windmill. Both director Nicholson and cinematographer David Connell (“Bushfire Moon”, the spoofy “Hercules Returns”) show themselves to have a keen eye and an ability to drum up an impending sense of dread and doom visually. It’s so good-looking that at times you’d swear it was a Russell Mulcahy (“Razorback”) film. As for the story, there’s some corniness to the second half (which is more juvenile survival story) but the first half sounds like something that could very well have been based on a true story, even if it isn’t (It’s loosely based on a 1972 incident, but I can almost guarantee the second half is largely made up). 

Rachel Ward, an underrated actress, is perfect in the lead role, and while I think Vernon Wells can be terrifying without a mask he and the others playing the robbers let the creepy masks do most of the job. That’s fine, because under that Father Christmas mask Peter Hehir looks pretty goddamn demonic. They’re a pretty seedy group (in a believably feral Aussie way), with Hehir a particularly surly bastard. As a kid, they scared the shit out of me and at age 39 they still worked in that regard for me. I do wish they were scripted to be a little smarter though, they kinda turn into “Skippy” villains at the climax, which although somewhat understandable given they’re facing off against mostly kids, is rather regrettable. There’s some interesting and familiar names and faces among the kids, including rugby league journeyman Sean Garlick in a pre-footy acting stint. They’re all effectively kid-like: Noisy, annoying, obnoxious and scared when required. When the cave entrance gets closed on them, I was nearly as petrified as the damn kids were. It was a whole lotta nope for me, thank you very much.

Although some of the story elements do have a bit of a corny, juvenile effect, I still think this one’s best viewed by adults. One murder in particular, although a brief shot, is rather gory for something that aired on American cable TV (It wasn’t made-for-TV locally, though). Odd mixture of bleak and corny it may be, it’s nonetheless every bit as good and creepy as I remember, featuring a pretty bizarro Aussie cast. Rachel Ward is excellent, and the ending is one of the more memorably macabre you’re likely to see. Even at age 39, that ending still seems rather fucked up to me.

Rating: B+