The small town of Paris, New South Wales, rests underneath a perilous hillside road. While driving with their caravan, Arthur Waldo (Terry Camilleri) and his brother George (Rick Scully) are involved in a terrible accident on this road, writing off the car and killing George. Arthur finds himself in the town, under the care of the mayor (John Meillon) and his wife (Melissa Jaffer). His bids to leave town fall short; he is mentally unprepared to drive following a previous traumatic incident of vehicular manslaughter, there’s no public transport, and he soon backs off an attempt to go by foot when he encounters a bunch of ominous youths staking out the road in similarly ominous cars, leaving him essentially stranded. It goes without saying, the town is far from benign. The pass is an accident hotspot, quite by design; with a lack of interest from the outside world, they’ve taken to getting everything they need from the vehicles that fall off the road, though some of these vehicles need a little encouragement.

A weird and maybe important film in Australian film history, The Cars That Ate Paris is also one of those films that seems to have been almost entirely impossible to market. There seems to have been a prevailing question amongst distributors, in Australia itself at least, as to who exactly to try and sell it to; to the degree where when it failed for the original distributor, they sold it on to a different one who tried it with another tack. The specifics seeming to be whether it’s a horror film or an art film for marketing purposes. I guess you can’t do both for whatever reason. I’d probably skew more the latter, though frankly the excitingly schlocky title doesn’t really help; you could see something more recently with The Man Who Killed Hitler and then the Bigfoot (2018) which also isn’t quite the film the title, accurate as it may be, appears to be pitching. In the case of The Cars That Ate Paris, while the art and horror elements are present, it’s a lot harder to pigeonhole in general. It’s like a weird mishmash of elements Mad Max (1979), Honky Tonk Freeway (1981) and Britannia Hospital (1982) and a whole lot else besides, but doesn’t have enough of really any of them for it to be comfortable drawing too much of a comparison. That and it predates all three of those I just specifically named anyway.

This is the first full length feature directed by Peter Weir,† who, as you may know, was one of the prominent figures of the Australian New Wave movement of the ‘70s and ‘80s, New Waves being as they were the style at the time. Well, not really. A lot of these cinematic New Waves had petered out by then. Australia’s came relatively late, because their native film industry had declined sharply after the war and was barely existent by the ‘60s; the government put a lot of money into revitalising it, aiding with funding, development, training, the works, the fruits of which coming in the ‘70s with people like Weir, George Miller and Fred Schepisi, amongst others.

Sitting uneasily in the horror genre, the bulk of the film largely involves the outsider, Arthur, exploring the town and experiencing its day-to-day life, such as it is, with very little actual action. In this sense, it’s probably most easily compared to something like The Wicker Man (1973), although unlike in that film where Edward Woodward’s policeman is antagonistic towards the isolated community (and, you know, has a definite goal in mind), here our point-of-view character is pretty much straight neutral. The film’s central satire is, of course, built around the idea of modernity, itself represented by motoring. Paris exists in a strange state where it seems more like the 1950s than the 1970s in look and feel. Perhaps it was normal for small town rural Australia to exist in such a time warp in the ‘70s, obviously I have no way of knowing, but regardless it helps to sell the sense that the town has been all but forgotten as motorways and bypasses take over the land, continuing to eke out its existence essentially as a monster unto itself. The people who encounter it are either absorbed or destroyed. While the town exists as a spider’s web, there’s friction between the different generations. While the older establishment figures are all about the status quo, its sustainability comes into question. Also, you know, the ethics, but that’s something no one outside of Arthur seem particularly bothered by. At least as a rule; there are certain exceptions that are apparently beyond the pale for these people, because some lives are worth more than others to them. The flip side is the younger set. They also have rather a lack of ethics, though are probably less hypocritical about it than their elders. With the town’s dying, they apparently seek to go hunting rather than waiting for prey to come to them, creating modified death vehicles that terrorise the town and the highways. This conflict will and does inevitably come to a head that threatens to destroy everything. 

Arthur, for his part, seems to be intended to represent the hinterland between the town’s youth and its establishment, with him being young enough to be distinct from the town’s aging population, but too in with said population to be part of the younger set (the mayor appointing him the new traffic warden sees to that). This might have worked a bit better if Terry Camilleri was younger looking; while he was a fairly appropriate for the role early-mid twenties, he’s one of those who seems to look quite a bit older. (At least he’s not playing a high schooler, right, kids?! Ah, this’ll date when I wrote this.)

What ultimately is the take away here? Hmm. That is a question. Paris’ (older) residents present the town as some kind of rural idyll, but that the town is built on a foundation of cruelty is readily apparent. The vast array of murder and mutilation that goes on is just an everyday thing. It’s just how things work. They just don’t admit to it being ‘bad’, so it’s fine, I guess. No need to do a thing about it. At the same time, obviously the alternative that threatens to split the town isn’t an improvement. The roving gangs of murder wagons are coded as villainous, but this is largely from the perspective of the older townspeople who deem themselves respectable and, as pointed out, they have a certain honesty about what they’re doing that said older townspeople lack. The end result would promise much the same however, the lawful evil supplanted by a chaotic one. It’s worth bearing in mind however, that while the town’s downfall comes at the hand of the alienated youth, it’s a problem created by the establishment who have essentially sealed their own fate.



Then Peter Weir made Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). The end.

† Perhaps most notably, he’d previously directed 1971’s Homesdale; a ‘long short-feature’ as I’ve seen the BFI rather awkwardly call films longer than 40 minutes but not really of a length that people would deem a full ‘feature film’, generally meaning an hour or 70 minutes of something (typically, this means support features); a black comic horror affair which received some pretty good buzz and awards and all that jazz.