The Five Weirdest Forgotten Classics Of Australian Cinema
When we do weird, we do pretty bloody weird.
The Cars That Ate Paris, Peter Weir (1974)
Some critics call this a horror film, others a comedy. I can never decide. It’s certainly horrific, but not in a slashy, gory way, and it’s certainly funny, but not in a laugh-out-loud-gags way.
Set in the 1970s, the film follows Arthur, a pretty passive, softly-spoken sorta bloke, who crashes his car in rural Australia and finds himself seriously injured, scared of driving and stranded indefinitely in a town called Paris. The guys in the town salvage car wreckage to create Frankenstein-style monster vehicles, while the doctors salvage survivors, lobotomise them and perform sick, sad medical experiments on them. It all deteriorates into wholesale civil war, with warring hoons and a conspiracy that goes all the way to the town Mayor.
If there seems to be little in terms of cause and effect in this plot description, it’s because the film plays it straight, letting Paris’ hideousness unspool with quiet confidence. It’s unlike anything else I’ve seen: a disturbing satire, a bleakly funny anti-comedy. And it’s strangely truthful: rural Australia is in many ways a dark-as horror show that revolves around shit beer and mad cars, and barely repressed, banal brutality.
Peter Weir went on to smash it in Hollywood and make The Truman Show (1998). Though they’re ostensibly disparate in style and tone, the two films make sense together. Weir is a filmmaker who seems to understand the intrinsic weirdness of the way humans do things on planet Earth. He especially understands the oddness lurking underneath Australia’s super-comfortable, middle-class exterior: what the hell is going on in this country? What is being covered up?
Weir eventually made Picnic at Hanging Rock. Meanwhile, Mad Max director George Miller went on to make Happy Feet. Enough said.
WATCH IT: Via the postal DVD service from Quickflix.com.au.