As a kid in the mid-1970s, this writer saw a strange vision in the street. Ive been haunting London cinemas, bookshops and pubs for longer than most of you have been alive, and experienced a few odd pop-cultural moments along the way. This one caused a double-take, but I knew instantly what it was: on the back of a trailer was a Volkswagen like a porcupine with deadly metal spikes. Id been reading in World of Horror magazine about THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS, and knew that the homicidal-looking Herbie was the weapon in a fight-back in a murderous outback town. It must have been on its way to that autumns London Film Festival, and had presumably been driven in after modification at an Essex car plant. THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS was the first feature by Australian auteur Peter Weir. An uneven black comedy, its storyline of a small backwater (actually Sofala in New South Wales theres not actually a Paris, Australia in the sense that theres a Paris, Texas) that rigs car accidents in order to loot the victims, despatching any survivors off to lobotomy wards, is similar to the grim humour of contemporary British piece HORROR HOSPITAL (1973). Weir continued his career with the more subtly eerie PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975) and THE LAST WAVE (1978), both of which shared the eerie air of his debut, before going on to work with a post-MAD MAX Mel Gibson and migrating to Hollywood. Predictably, perhaps, Oz genre film buff Jay doesnt see Weirs automotive carnage as a road movie: It focuses on the car, of course, but the movie is basically set in a static town with the car playing second fiddle as a plot device. The only road part is the beginning of the film, where they attract car accidents to the town. Then, I dont really know where these people come from, but theres a showdown. Indeed, the idiot savant-ish main character of Arthur (Terry Camilleri) whose brother was killed in a staged crash but whos been adopted by the town mayor finally leaves town when a phalanx of youthful malcontents raise havoc in their customised vehicles, including the spiky VW. The action scenes are brief, though effective, but it was as much the movies poster that inspired Roger Cormans New World Pictures to produce their own piece of auto-carnage, DEATH RACE 2000 (1975), as the film itself. In retrospect, Weir saw THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS as a vision partly realised: I never took it as far as I wanted to, the feeling of a country in some sort of economic chaos. There were to be troops in the countryside, anarchy in the air, odd radio reports of massive road accidents Its interesting when you look at MAD MAX and MAD MAX 2, because George Miller said the same thing: that in the first film he got done what he could, but in the second he was able to put in all the texture hed wanted to in the first.
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
