Long Weekend was a fairly anonymous Australian entry in the
horror film cycle of the late 1970s, something of a failure on its domestic
release but, similarly to Don’t Look Now
and The Wicker Man and thanks to an
unusual premise, one that has since become something of a cult celebre.
Approximately midway between Peter Weir’s 1974 debut The Cars That Ate Paris and subsequent Picnic at Hanging Rock in tone and theme, Colin Eggleston’s best
remembered feature asks what might happen if nature looked at its treatment at
the hands of man and decided to fight back. It’s the kind of film that once
caught on a television outing would haunt the memories of anyone who saw it.
Peter and Marcia are a
fairly typically self-obsessed couple whose marriage is falling apart, and who
take a weekend’s break at a deserted stretch of the northern coast in an
attempt to repair it. Ignorant, arrogant and impatient, both Peter and Marcia
begin the trip with a complete disregard for the countryside around them, the
journey to the beach including the accidental killing of a kangaroo in a manner
that will prove a forewarning of later events. Once they arrive – rather later
than intended thanks to nature already beginning to reject their presence –
they behave with total insensitivity towards their surroundings, Peter eager to
use his new gun, the reluctant camper Marcia killing just as freely with
insecticides.
Long
Weekend is far from perfect, its message delivered with a blunt hammer to the
head, and much of the foreshadowing about what is to come being overwhelmingly
obvious. But Eggleston’s film – the first from writer Everett de Roche, who
would subsequently deliver other cult favourites Harlequin, Roadgames and Razorback – is surprisingly effective in
its conveyance of a sense of unease, with several clichéd horror ideas played
lightly or unconventionally enough to feel fresh and disturbing in their
depiction.
Things don’t end well, of
course, and if the film has a problem it’s that with no other characters to
speak of, the viewer is forced into either attempting to identify with a couple
of pretty hideous people, or else taking nature’s side (obviously the
intention), a path which can leave a feeling of emotional distance from the
drama. There’s a sense, ironically, that it goes against nature to wish ill
upon the only human characters, and yet that’s what de Roche’s script is asking
us to do, mostly very successfully.
With a raft of good extras
and as decent a widescreen transfer as might be expected, this Blu-ray edition
is as definitive a release as Long
Weekend has ever had, and should make those who grew up troubled by its topics
very happy.
