A.k.a. The Cars That Eat People
D/S: Peter Weir. Story: Peter Weir, Keith Gow. P: Hal and Jim McElroy. Cast: John Meillon, Terry Camilleri, Kevin Miles, Chris Haywood, Bruce Spence. UK dist (DVD): Second Sight.
The first of many a love-letter to the Kangaroo State’s brazen seraglio of supercharged, gas-guzzling, absurdly-enhanced automobiles, The Cars That Ate Paris was the barmy brainchild of future Picnic at Hanging Rock auteur Peter Weir, presumably after staying out in the sun too long with no hat. Essentially it’s a tale of Cornish ship-wreckers, transplanted to the dusty, flyblown Outback – for the Paris of the title is neither the biggie in France, nor t’other in Texas, but a one-step-up-from-a-shanty-town in good old Oz.
Unwary travellers driving through the environs of Paris find themselves swiftly mangled in auto-wrecks engineered by the homicidal locals (including Bruce Spence, of later Mad Max 2 renown), for reasons which are never quite clear. The latest victim, a five-time-loser and nervous wreck, unexpectedly survives the accident that kills his brother; having nowhere else to go, he opts to become a Parisian. It’s not long before he’s practically adopted by the local Mayor (John Meillon), who gives him the job of Town Parking Officer in an effort to curb the lawless activities of the local petrolheads, yobs and lowlifes who’ve been terrorising the inhabitants. Oh yes, and there’s also a lunatic asylum nearby, home to the brain-damaged victims of the wreckers. At least, that’s probably who they are. How this connects with the rest of the story is anyone’s guess. But it almost certainly does. Maybe.
The eponymous Cars themselves, a squadron of demolition-derby jalopies souped-up with a variety of interestingly abstract – and lethal – modifications (one part Wacky Races to nine parts Salvador Dali), are depicted almost as a strange new life-form, freshly arisen from the Surrealist workshop of the Outback. When one of their number is immolated in the town square for vandalising the Mayor’s front yard, trouble begins to brew; “The Cars didn’t like the burning,” one of the townsfolk remarks with accurate foreboding. It’s not long before Paris finds itself under full-scale attack by the Cars, and our timid protagonist must find the courage to get back behind the wheel of a car and defend his town.
Had it taken the concept a little bit further, and proposed a Cronenberg-like fusion of man and machine (with a Ballardian nod to psychosexual undercurrents fizzing under the bonnet), the film might have earned itself a larger footnote in the history of Ozsploitation; as it stands, the film slides quite quickly from the memory, with only the nightmare image of a silver VW beetle, bristling with chromium porcupine spines, lingering in the mind’s eye. The film offers some nice quirky humour and gory carnage, but the overall impression is of a puzzling oddity which never quite decides what it’s actually about. (Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000, released the following year, handled similar black-comic themes far more successfully.)