aka Cars That Eat People

• Written and directed by Peter Weir
• Starring
  • John Meillon
  • Terry Camilleri
  • Kevin Miles

There are some directors who seem to arrive on the scene with many of their abilities and skills intact — they seem so whole and professional, it’s almost as if they sprang whole from Zeus’ head. Peter Jackson, especially falls into this narrow category.

Then there are those directors whose earliest features were so void of redeeming qualities that, although they did manage later in their careers to accomplish something worthwhile with celluloid, by any objective criteria they should never have gotten the second chance to make a first impression.

Enter Peter Weir.

His recent career is bedecked with such worthwhile films as Witness, Dead Poets Society, and The Truman Show. And for such,we should be grateful. But his early career has such a blot on it that natural selection should have diverted his career into public access documentaries and “little” films.

That blot is The Cars That Ate Paris.

We begin with a shaggy blond couple (this is 1974, after all), idyllically providing the product placement while benign wakka-wakka guitars play in the background. (The products in question, by the way, are Alpine cigarettes and Coke.) They buy these products to consume as they drive across (presumably) the Australian hinterlands, stopping and chuckling as sheep are herded across the road. Then, in the middle of their day in the sun, they lose a wheel and topple over the end of a cliff.

Roll credits. (And I will point out that not only are these people irrelevant, but the entire sequence is irrelevant. Read on.)

We now meet two new people — George and Arthur Waldo, brothers travelling around with their small camper-trailer, shown in a montage of hard luck as looking for work. Arthur is a particularly sad-looking individual, and there is soon a reason for it; while Arthur sleeps in the passenger seat, George negotiates a mountain road; he suddenly sees lights ahead and swerves, ending up at the bottom of the cliff.

George dies, but Arthur is taken to the hospital of the miniscule town of Paris, where a single doctor runs a hospital with a full upper floor of mental patients — all accident victims. George is sort-of taken in by the town and its mayor, despite the normal “don’t like outsiders” attitude.

Within ten minutes, we’ve picked up on all the clues (even if Arthur doesn’t, demonstrating that he has the mental acuity of rhubarb). The radios in everyone’s houses are car radios. Half of the furniture is actually automotive. One guy has auto name plaques decorating his leather jacket.

That’s right, the town’s economy survives on tricking drivers into crashing, then scavenging the cars. In case we missed the clues, we then get to see a midnight scene of a car being parted out, the belongings being split up between citizens, and the injured-but-living driver being given over to the doctor for lobotomy-style experimentation.

OK, so that’s first ten minutes! So where does the movie go from here?

AB
SO
LUTE
LY
NOWHERE! The rest of the running time is largely Arthur wandering around town, making non-friends with the taciturn locals, dithering on whether he should hitchhike out of town or stay there, and generally being the most personality-less character ever to grace my VCR. The story has used up all of its tricks in the first ten minutes; the only approximations of action to follow (“approximation” in the sense that a popsicle stick is an approximation of the UN General Assembly) is when the “youngsters” of the town (i.e., anyone up to thirty) roars through in their brightly painted rebuilt cars that look like Day-Glo version of Mad Max vehicles. That, and the town ball, at which the entertainment is the pianist who plays “Little Brown Jug” in a continuous loop for ten minutes.The initial set-piece scene, by the way, is thus rendered irrelevant because the crashes that concern the story have all been engineered — so what if two people who have nothing to do with the story have a crash that has nothing to do with the story?I hope you can now also see how wildly inaccurate the title is. Even the other title by which it’s known, Cars That Eat People, has it backwards; the best variation is People That Eat Cars.

Some directors can make excuses for their early sins; James Cameron, for instance, can quite rightly blame Piranha 2 on being handed a substandard script by the money-grubbing owners of a poor franchise. Peter Weir has no such excuse; he co-wrote the story, and handled the screenplay himself, thus providing the world with one of the best arguments in recent memory against “purity of the director’s vision.”

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 8
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
• cars that eat Paris: 0