“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.”

Tags: Briony Behets, Colin Eggleston, John Hargreaves, Long Weekend, Not Quite Hollywood, Ozploitation

This post was written by Nicholas Bell, Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 11:57 am and is filed under Diversionary Tactics, Does It Hold Up?, Musings, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.