WHERE TOURISTS BECOME VICTIMS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

THE AUSTRALIAN slasher thriller ``Wolf Creek'' is pretty good for this kind of thing. Or, at least, it's OK up to the point when it becomes ``The Outback Chainsaw Massacre,'' which is when the movie loses both sense and its sense of distinction.

Takes awhile to get there, though. Before then, this could be a credible portrait of young people on a party vacation. The characters aren't very interesting, but they do feel remarkably real.

Liz (Cassandra Magrath) and Kristy (Kestie Morassi) are two English girls having a holiday on Western Australia's beaches. It's drunken pool parties, sleeping on the sand, that kind of thing, until Ben (Nathan Phillips), a nice surfer bloke from Sydney, rents an old jalopy and suggests driving out to look at the remote Wolf Creek meteor crater.

They do so, joking and making a little romance and encountering a couple of country cretins across the many miles of empty desert. When the trio hike back from the crater, their car won't start. And in the middle of the night, affable bushman Mick (John Jarratt) shows up in his big ol' truck and tows them to the abandoned mine site he calls home. Mick, who likes to talk about shooting kangaroos, sets to fixing the kids' vehicle while the visitors gulp down cups of his freshly caught rainwater.

Then, blackout.

When Liz wakes up, hogtied, it's pretty apparent that Mick may not be as nice a guy as Crocodile Dundee. The rest of the movie delineates just how sick he is.

It isn't so much Mick's gleeful desecration of female flesh - practically all the movies in this genre revel in such perversion now - as the fact that Liz and Kristy turn dog stupid in the face of his depredations. This is one of those films where the victims get the upper hand several times and just don't bash their tormentor's skull in when any moron would know they should. Sure, the girls are traumatized, but that's even more reason not to leave Mick unconscious - but alive - with his shotgun lying next to him.

Oh well. It started out promising. Also on the plus side, Jarratt makes for a cool new kind of corn-pone villain, as amusing as he is menacing (at least before he goes totally super- psycho). The DV shot feature also makes dark, empty country roads appear even more ominous than they naturally are.

Writer-director Greg McLean says his film is based on true incidents, and the movie notes that some 30,000 people go missing in Australia each year. That's pretty alarming for a place with a relatively small population, though with so much empty territory, maybe most of them are not missing so much as hiding. A movie about why someone would choose to disappear Down Under would probably be more engaging than, and likely just as chilling as, the disappointingly formulaic ``Wolf Creek.''

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

WOLF CREEK - Two and one half stars

(R: violence, language, drug use)

Starring: John Jarratt, Cassandra Magrath, Kestie Morassi, Nathan Phillips.

Director: Greg McLean.

Running time: 1 hr. 39 min.

Playing: Opens Sunday in wide release.

In a nutshell: What starts out as a fairly credible, if unremarkable, tale of tourists being terrorized in the Australian Outback devolves into standard slasher movie stupidity and sadism.

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Tourists in the Australian Outback quickly become the hunted in the slasher flick ``Wolf Creek.''