Past Cinema Regression: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf Down Under? – Environmental Horror Ozploit, “Long Weekend” (1978)
This post was written by Nicholas Bell, Friday, August 21st, 2009
“It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature,” we learned from Chiffon margarine. Well, if Ma Nature doesn’t like you fucking with her butter, then her reaction to being desecrated, raped and disrespected in the Australian horror classic, Long Weekend, is perfectly reasonable. Only recently available on DVD, Long Weekend has been considered one of those little seen, dismissed- upon-release films belonging to a genre cheerily known as Ozploitation. The genre recently received its own playful expose with director Mark Hartley’s documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2008), which documents the rise of the Aussie film industry after the loosening of censorship in the early 70’s. Hartley’s film sports exploitation auteur Quentin Tarantino raving about Colin Eggleston’s 1978 film, Long Weekend, which may owe most of its creepy atmosphere to an understated but effective screenplay by Everett De Roache. Steering clear of any definable social or political messages, Weekend strongly aligns itself with the environmental horror genre (think Fessenden’s excellent The Last Winter, 2006, or if you were unfortunate enough to see it, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, 2008). Clearly, the film is about man’s brutal, ignorant disrespect for the environment, but perhaps more eerily, the film also seems sports a deviously delightful Pro-Choice message.
Like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1968)—without all the booze and bitchy academia— spliced with The Birds (1963), Weekend invites us to take a trip with Peter (John Hargreaves) and Marcia (Briony Behets), a fractured, unhappy couple attempting to mend their evaporating marriage. Before we even begin the camping journey, we sense that Marcia’s been having herself a little fun on the side, our introduction to Peter is while he’s peering at his wife through the sights of his shotgun—unbeknownst to her. Careening forward, the couple bickers continually while attempting to find an obscure beach in the wilderness. It turns out that Marcia, in particular, does not enjoy the outdoors, though she has a bit more respect for her surroundings than her ape of a husband. Strange noises and eerie, piercing screams like that of a wounded child prey on Marcia’s stressed out psyche. And then the animals start to attack, including an opossum that latches onto Peter’s hand, and an eagle that swoops down from the sky to attack Peter. Previously, Marcia had been seen cradling a large, speckled egg, which the couple surmised belonged to an eagle. Marcia deduced from the attack that eagle had come for its egg, which she picks up and dashes against a tree, where it splatters a goopy blood-like substance mixed with yellow, oozing yolk. And then she starts sobbing about her abortion, revealing why she keeps eluding the frustrated and horny Peter. In a later conversation in the vehicle, Peter pointedly alludes to the fact that Marcia is a murderer, particularly of unborn, helpless, things like eggs and fetuses. An asshole move if you’ve ever seen one. Especially when Marcia reveals her cause for the abortion—-Peter coveted his neighbor’s wife and seems to have offered up his own wife as a sacrifice. Only the neighbor’s wife didn’t want Peter, and let’s just say Peter didn’t sire the dead fetus.
The creepiest mammal moment comes when Marcia spies an ominous, effectively creepy dark object in the water while Peter is swimming in the ocean. Alerting her husband, Marcia assures him that it couldn’t have been a shark. On a second sighting, Peter shoots the object in the water until the waves turn red. The dark, bloated object that ends up on shore is a dugong, or a sea cow. Chewed on by crabs, this dugong looks like the Corky of dugongs (shorthand for special) and Peter surmises this was the animal making all the shrieking noises in the night. Nothing seems out of place about the dugong—Peter explains there used to be a plethora (my word, not his) of dugongs on the coast until their numbers were systematically depleted by man. But when the shrieking doesn’t stop, and the dugong corpse ends up getting closer and closer to the tent site, Peter and Marcia’s paranoia begins to exacerbate their already bewildered relationship. Not to mention the underwater corpses Peter finds in a car, or the eerily abandoned tent site where only a feral, angry dog remains. Leaving Peter behind, Marcia takes off in the vehicle, leaving Peter to fend for himself in the night, where suddenly all of nature around him seems rife with threat. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but much debate has been made of the film’s meaning—is it really Mother Nature fighting back? Or is it something within the couple themselves that makes this a Man Vs. Himself picture? Whatever interpretation, the film is certainly an effective creepfest with some surprisingly realistic and believable performances from the two leads. The rest of director Eggleston’s filmography is muddled, at best (Sky Pirates, 1986; Outback Vampires, 1987) but Long Weekend is indeed one of those unheard of gems that deserves some attention and just as eerie as Aussie art-house fare like Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975). A critical and commercial flop upon release in Australia, the film found its audience overseas, with four distributors vying for its rights during a screening at the Cannes Film Festival. Still relatively unknown, take a trip with Peter and Marcia: “Their crime was against nature….Nature found them guilty.”
In honor of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, I’d like to draw your attention to a great little movie about America’s space travel program. No, it’s not the gorgeous 
Classified as a film noir, and long since regarded in its native country as a misfire from its successful director, The Big Knife, released in 1955, is neither a noir nor a misfire. Nestled in between Robert Aldrich’s releases of two of his most highly acclaimed 50’s films (Kiss Me Deadly, 1955, often cited as a definitive film noir and Autumn Leaves, 1956, his first pairing with Joan Crawford), The Big Knife sank like a lead balloon at the box office and hasn’t received a whole lot of love since. Perhaps trying to masquerade as a film-noir is the reason for all the disappointment—there’s nothing all that exciting about The Big Knifeas it’s really a condemnation of the Hollywood studio system and not a murder mystery including a man led astray by a femme fatale. The Big Knife is based on the stage play by Clifford Odets (who also penned The Country Girl, 1954 and Clash By Night, 1952) and relates two days in the life of Charles Castle (played by Jack Palance), a major Hollywood Star (think Charleston Heston, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando) who has sold his dreams to the studio by churning out mediocre motion pictures rather than quality cinema. Not to mention, it’s made to seem as if he likes the ladies, contributing to his wife (Ida Lupino) leaving him, threatening not to come back if he renews a seven year contract that studio head Stanley Hoff (Rod Steiger) and his assistant Smiley Coy (the always creepy Wendell Corey) are asking him to sign. The trouble is, Hoff and Coy helped cover up a little DUI incident several years prior in which Castle killed a young child. However, Castle’s press agent took the blame, serving a prison sentence for him. Wishing to save his marriage, Castle attempts to avoid signing the contract, a plan which fails. The situation is exacerbated by an alcoholic studio starlet, Dixie Evans (Shelley Winters), a woman of easy virtue involved in the drunken killing spree that demanded a contract of her own to shut her up. The studio, neglecting to give her any starring roles, asks Castle to feed her poisoned gin to shut her up, a request that sends Castle over the edge and into a very melodramatic conclusion.
Aldrich cattily blamed Jack Palance for the film’s failure, stating Palance didn’t have matinee star good looks to make him believable in his role (Palance didn’t feel too badly, he went on to film several other movies with Aldrich, like Attack, 1956 and Ten Seconds to Hell, 1959). However, Palance is quite believable and quite good, despite having to throw around ridiculous phrases with Wendell Corey concerning how he is the “warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope.” Excuse me, but what? Ida Lupino and Jean Hagen aren’t given much to do beyond playing virgin vs. whore, but Winters is given the best scene in the film as the drunken prostitute (ahem, starlet) threatening to expose a murderous scandal. (Which is, by the way, apparently based on the real 1930’s cover-up of a drunken driving accident involving a young John Huston with the actual Louis B. Mayer performing the cover up, paying Louella Parsons an large sum of money to keep her mouth shut—though there were plenty of other similar scandals involving a plethora of bankable movie stars). Throw in a few moments of not-so-subtle homosexuality (including Palance’s personal trainer, Nick, who is OBSESSED with patting, hugging, caressing, bathing and rubbing him down) and a scene where Wendell Corey asks Palance from out of nowhere, “What do you think of women, kiddie?” and you have a film rife with devious intentions just begging to be rediscovered. “Oh, there’s room in the world for ‘em,” responds Palance, which is strange for a film which tries to posit Palance as a proverbial “pussy-hound.” However, it’s easy to note that he’s constantly turning down women like Winters and Hagen, seeming more alarmed at indiscretions that might happen when he’s bombed. Wendell Corey, as representative of the studio has an apparent interest in portraying its heartthrob in a certain light, caring little about how it fares for his marriage, and seemingly having a passing interest in what his real orientation might be. (The film opens with a Louella Parsons type gossip columnist sniffing around about Castle’s marriage, wishing to be the first to report trouble, adding to the reduction of marriage and divorce as simply a headline). Though flawed in various ways, The Big Knife isn’t a film which can be simply brushed off as high melodrama—it’s brave, it’s important and it’s got something to say, in more ways than one. Meant as a weapon to skewer an industry, perhaps the film only highlights that an industry based on smoke and mirrors has no heart to stab at all.
“Men can be quite a bit lower than the angels,” quips Shelley Winters, starring as Helen Hill, the titular character in Curtis Harrington’s dismissed ode to Grand Guginol, What’s The Matter With Helen? Her astute observation happens to be the most revealing detail of a gorgeously constructed opera of murder and sexual innuendo, unfairly dismissed as camp due to its unfortunate marketing campaign and considerable likeness to what Roger Ebert coined “the menopausal metaphysical mystery movie.” Ebert was referring, of course, to the beauty that bred our hunger for “horror hags,” Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Not a surprising conclusion, as author Henry Farrell penned Jane, Helen, and Aldrich’s follow-up to Baby Jane, Hush, Hush…Sweet Charlotte (1964). Furthermore, besides Bette Davis and Joan Crawford plumbing their newfound demand as horror hags in the 1960’s, there was Tallulah Bankhead in Die! Die! My Darling! (1965) and Robert Aldrich’s shameless attempt to cash in once again on Baby Jane when he produced and titled an even further removed Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969) starring Geraldine Page as a killer of old women for their insurance and Ruth Gordon as a wily housekeeper. It’s easy to see why Ebert and others dismissed Helen at the time as just another “Whatever” picture. However, What’s the Matter With Helen? is far from just another horror hag genre entry. Set in 1933, Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters star as two Mid-West mothers whose sons have committed a heinous murder of a young working woman. Their sons sentenced to life in prison, the two women, whose lives have gone through the ringer, are being harassed by an unknown man threatening to kill them (it is noteworthy that the man has singled out Winters and may have been responsible for slicing open her hand as the two women were jostled through a crowd). Rather than go to the police, Reynolds decides that the two should move to Hollywood where they could change their identities and open a dancing school for young girls trying to make it like Shirley Temple (Reynolds used to be a dancer before being forced to support her murderous son who wants nothing to do with her). Though Winters and Reynolds were considered actresses past their prime by 1971, they’re hardly Davis and Crawford grotesque, and while Baby Jane focuses on psychotic women in the present trapped in their past, Helen brings us back to significant moment in Depression era America where Hollywood was undergoing significant changes and upheavals. But the grand difference between this film and the crazy lady movies that graced American screens before it is the answer to the title question: What’s the matter with Helen? Well, she’s a closeted lesbian, that’s what’s wrong with her. What’s the Matter with Helen? reinterprets and rejects the heterosexual order established in 1930’s Hollywood films, an era that ushered in daring lesbian themes even as the Hollywood Production Code was being born to dispel them.
outside the frame, Winter isn’t an easy sale to the male voyeur, and neither is her purpose to attract a lesbian audience. Telling criticisms were from Vincent Canby of the NY Times, who referred to Winters as “wearing the expression of a reproachful pudding,” while Roger Ebert wrote, “Now we get to see what happens when the hairdresser and makeup artists have their revenge.” Winters character is the closeted Mid-West woman that abstained from everything but religious fervor, obsessed with a radio evangelist played by the excellent Agnes Moorhead (an homage to the scandalous Aimee Semple McPherson of the 1930’s). Further evidence of Winter’s closeted sexuality is the fact that she murdered her husband (in front of her son, hinting at some The Bad Seed, 1956, elements), constantly asserts her aversion to men, (including the simpering, flamboyant homosexual Reynolds hires at her dance school, played by Micheal MacLiammoir), becomes agitated at Reynold’s hetero relationship, exclaiming she just wants it to be them again, as “friends,” and makes several statements about Reynolds’ beautiful appearance.
In anticipation of the new Woody Allen movie Whatever Works, I thought I’d look back at some of Captain Neurosis’ classic movies. Recently, a friend mentioned that he had seen thirty-nine of Allen’s forty-some pictures. Thirty-nine? I was stunned, in part because I didn’t realize Allen had made so many. Looking at the Allen entry at the supposedly unreliable IMDb.com, I counted the movies of his I’d seen–thirty. Was I a film geek, an Allenophile, what?
