LONG WEEKEND 1978

"Hey, farmer, farmer put away the DDT, now. Give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees. Please."    Big Yellow Taxi - Joni Mitchell - 1970 

The toxic pesticide DDT wasn’t banned until 1972, but the Environmentalist social movement responsible for bringing about that particular ecological ruling is also credited with inspiring the “Nature Strikes Back!” genre of horror films so popular in the '70s. Environmental horror films, also known as eco-horror movies, were a genre of exploitation film that saw wildlife and nature rebelling against mankind’s abuses. They were an amalgam of the mutant monster movies of the Atomic Age ‘50s; the man-against-man paranoia films of the Cold-War ‘60s; and the onset '70s realization that the prosperity-based corporate/industrialist “plastics” future satirically endorsed in The Graduate (1967) was taking a dire toll on the planet. Capturing the post-Vietnam/Watergate zeitgeist, these "Green Panic" films--well-intentioned exercises in societal self-flagellation---were the anxiety-induced by-product of America’s disillusionment and guilt.

When I was a kid, the air was literally brown with smog, motorists habitually dumped ashtrays and garbage out of their windows onto the freeway, and city sidewalks were freckled with the dots of chewing gum, cigarette butts, and the flip top tabs of soft drink cans. Pets were property, dog owners were not required to curb their dogs or pick up after them, and the lack of mandatory leash laws turned a child's daily walk home from school (me being the child in question) into an impromptu episode of Wild Kingdom.

Long Weekend is the first feature film for Australian director Colin Eggleston, and the first feature-length original screenplay from American writer Everett De Roche, who followed this up with the telekinesis thriller Patrick (1978)

I was a three-year-old when those national “Keep America Beautiful” anti-littering ads began appearing on television. I was 13 by the declaration of the first Earth Day (April 22, 1970). By age 14, Italian-American actor Iron Eyes Cody debuted as the teary-eyed Native American in a long-running series of national anti-litterbug PSAs. Seventies headlines not devoted to the war in Vietnam or our crumbling democracy were devoted to news of man-made ecological disasters, panic-pieces on the dangers of nuclear power, and the ecological risks posed by pesticides, deforestation, and unchecked industrial waste.

In the shadow of a senseless war, government corruption, and economic collapse, the rapidly deteriorating environmental landscape came to mirror the American public's eroding faith in its leaders and institutions. It has always been a given that self-annihilation was the inevitable endgame of man's inhumanity to man, but when this callous disregard for existence looked to extend itself to the destruction of innocent wildlife and the environment as a whole, motion pictures took up the cathartic mantle of providing defenseless mother Nature with a melodramatic avenue of recourse: violent resistance.

John Hargreaves as Peter

Briony Behets as Marcia

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), while lacking the kind of environmentalist score-settling that later came to typify the genre, is considered one of the earliest examples of “man vs. nature” horror. A few undistinguished low-budget thrillers like 1966's The Deadly Bees followed, but it took the sleeper success of Willard (1971)—with its supporting cast of rampaging rodents—to really spearhead the “animals on the attack” craze of the 1970s. Many of these films, especially Jaws (1975)...perhaps the most successful and influential film of this ilk, simply inserted members of the animal kingdom into the old Drive-In movie sci-fi and monster movie template (Grizzly – 1976, Orca - 1977, The White Buffalo - 1977, Nightwing - 1979, Night of the Lepus). 

Others, like King Kong (1976) and The Swarm (1978) outfitted the old-fashioned monster movie with trendy environmentalist themes and restructured it to conform to the then-popular disaster film mold. But it was movies with titles like Food of the Gods (1976), Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), Empire of the Ants (1977), and Day of the Animals (1977) that established ecological horror as a standalone exploitation subgenre which sought to extract allegorical lessons from man’s abuse of the environment and nature's violent revolt.  

Long Weekend, a 1978 Australian entry in the eco-horror cycle, is said to be a classic example of “Ozploitation”—the low-budget, sensationalist branch of the indie-film boom that saw Aussie features like Walkabout (1971), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), and Mad Max (1979) finding global popularity during the ‘70s and ‘80s. Unlike those films, Long Weekend was not a success in its home country, so its 1979 U.S. release came without benefit of advance word-of-mouth or much in the way of marketing fanfare. Which may go to explain why I’d never even heard of it before this year and why I don’t recall it having a Los Angeles release. More’s the pity. For Long Weekend is such an unexpectedly taut and atmospheric exercise in dread and character conflict, I know it would have been a favorite.

Long Weekend wins points right out of the gate in that it deftly combines elements of several of my favorite film styles: the domestic dysfunction drama (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Two for the Road, Closer ); the suspense thriller in which internal conflicts manifest as external threats (Black Swan, Images); the '70s disaster-survival film (The Poseidon Adventure); and the parapsychological haunted house movie (The Haunting).

Peter and Marcia, an unhappy couple living in the suburbs of Melbourne, embark, with polar opposite degrees of enthusiasm, on a trip to the Australian bush to camp, surf, and commune with nature over the course of a 4-day holiday weekend. Our introduction finds the attractive (if flinty) young couple barely on speaking terms: Marcia feeling Peter is behaving like “A real shit” for digging in his heels and dragging her off to rough it in the wild North when she’d much rather spend the weekend at a posh mountain resort with their neighbors Mark and Freda. Peter, a gung-ho, weekend-warrior type who fancies himself a rugged outdoorsman, finds Marcia's "I don't want to go" peevishness to be suspect (there are hints of infidelity), so he masks his passive-aggressive dominance (i.e., a total disinterest in anything Marcia wants) behind half-hearted conciliatory gestures.

"Peter, I'm not the type for crapping in the sunshine and yawning around campfires!"
Marcia's resistance to the whole camping ordeal finds her insulated from nature in an expensive tent surrounded by creature comforts while she reads Harold Robbins' trash novel "The Inheritors." On IMDB the book is mistaken for the thematically suitable novel of the same title by William Golding (author of Lord of the Flies. But alas, it's a more character-revealing novel about greed and wealth. 

As the two embark on their outing, encountering weather and traffic conditions which all but serve as banshee-screaming harbingers of doom urging the couple to “Go back!”, it isn't long before their ill-advised journey shows signs of becoming something of a metaphorical mystery tour. Past squabbles erupt, mutual dissatisfactions are aired, and along the way, a callous disregard for nature and the environment is evinced in terms reflective of their vacillating disregard for one another. It's in this manner that Long Weekend's cyclical (boomerang?) thematic structure is reinforced.
The gross discordancy of Peter and Marcia's relationship (like cast-out Adam and Eve, they are given no last names) visits itself upon their surroundings in such a way that the toxic bitterness of their interactions has the reverberative effect of despoiling the land and surrounding creatures until nature must, at last, intervene on life's behalf.

In an interview, the late Everett De Roche summarized the premise of his screenplay for Long Weekend as: “Mother Earth has her own auto-immune system, so when humans start behaving like cancer cells, She attacks.”

An unattended spear gun goes off, narrowly missing one of the campers. The already-evidenced supernatural energy of the campsite (frequently, nature is heard to scream or cry whenever attacked) has the tree to appear to die from the spear, as though mortally wounded

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I discovered Long Weekend after spending an afternoon watching Joan Collins in the deliciously tacky Empire of the Ants and logged onto IMDB to see where this rather embarrassing foray into ginormous papier-mâché insects fell in her lengthy resume (plop in the middle of a fallow spell four years before Dynasty came a-callin’). The site recommended similar titles, Long Weekend being among them, and based on the plot summary and my unfamiliarity with it, I was instantly intrigued. Wholly anticipating a fun & cheesy exercise in “When Good Animals Go Bad”-style, nature-run-amok horror, I was caught off guard (and pleasantly surprised) when Long Weekend turned out to be a suspenseful, genuinely frightening eco-thriller with a compellingly fucked-up marriage at its center.

I confess to the snarky, Albee-esque “George and Martha Go Camping” angle being my favorite element of Long Weekend, but I’m equally impressed by De Roche’s crisp screenplay and the economic style of Eggleston’s direction. Making the most of its modest budget: purposefully underpopulated, the film pulls off the impressive feat of making the great outdoors feel encroaching and claustrophobic; simple theme: all livings things have a right to their survival; and scenic locale: the film capitalizes on the ominously mystical quality of Australia’s undeveloped rural coast. Long Weekend tackles a great many sizable issues by training its lens on the details, and the result is an unexpectedly rich viewing experience.

Marcia and Peter's interactions are frequently filmed through foliage and from low, constantly
moving angles, as though they are being watched by some unseen forest creature 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The indestructibility of energy is a familiar theme in ghost stories and haunted house movies (how many films have used variations of the line “Evil never dies, it just changes form”?). In Long Weekend, humans are the generators of the malevolent energy that nature ultimately recycles and returns (with a vengeance) in a self-preservationist strike against the violent toxicity of mankind’s jackboot ecological footprint. Whereas a great many eco-horror films are built on the premise of humans being terrorized by beasts and wildlife invading populated areas of safety, Long Weekend casts humans as the pernicious intruders and despoilers of nature's beauty.

"What have you been doing to the tree?"
"Chopping it down."
"Why?"
"Why not?"

Humanity’s entitled encroachment upon wildlife’s natural habitat is reflected in the film’s opening scenes which present Marcia, dressed in a green floral print, tending to her indoor plants (the “imprisoned” florae harkening back to the caged lovebirds in Hitchcock’s film), packing up a frozen chicken (which slips from her grasp, as though still alive and trying to escape), and ignoring a TV news report about flocks of cockatoos destroying homes in Sydney as they gnaw on the wood structures in an effort to correct a dietary imbalance brought about by overdevelopment. (A real-life problem that persists to this day in Australia.)

If Marcia is symbolic of mankind’s indifference to the environment (she would have Peter leave his dog alone for three days with one bowl of food “She’s too fat, anyway!”) Peter—with his arsenal of violent recreational camping equipment—is humanity at its most aggro. Peter’s master-of-all-he-surveys arrogance is evident in the couple’s ceaselessly acrimonious interactions; actions rooted in possessiveness, betrayal, and the corrupt values of affluence. He is the side of humanity that would seek to exert dominance over nature rather than contemplate a balanced coexistence.

Long Weekend is at its most unnervingly chilling when the corresponding themes of its cyclical structure (nearly everything that occurs in the latter part of the film has been telegraphed earlier) converge at the campsite, and the heretofore realist narrative grows sinisterly supernatural. Nature appears to respond defensively and in kind to the couple’s amplified aggressions, leading to the ultimate face-off…a tension-filled 20-minute third act without dialogue…which comes an unforgettable shock.

PERFORMANCES

Given my weakness for movies about screwed-up people in troubled relationships, I don’t hold to the axiom that characters in a film need to be likable. Interesting and sympathetic perhaps, or, more to the point, empathetic works for me. Marcia & Peter are a pretty unpleasant pair as protagonists go, but as realized by British actor Briony Behets (at the time, wife of the director), and Australian actor John Hargreaves (who is truly splendid), they are believable as hell, and therefore, their flaws and weaknesses are compelling. If there's a sympathetic character to be found in the film at all, it's Mother Nature, whose army of benign-appearing warriors manage somehow to be both cute and discomfiting.

Gay actor John Hargreaves won Best Actor for his work in Long Weekend at The Sitges Film Festival (specializing in horror and fantasy films) in 1978, beating out Laurence Olivier in Dracula, Donald Pleasance in Halloween, and Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu. Hargreaves died of AIDS in 1996 and asked that his award be buried with him.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS  

The ‘70s are long gone, but in light of today’s concerns about global warming, climate change, and head-in-the-sand science deniers; I’d say the time was ripe for eco-horror movies to make a comeback. That is, until I happen to catch the news and am instantly reminded that we're all actually living IN an environmental horror movie. 

The third character in Long Weekend's three-character melodrama is the lush scenery of
Australia's Bournda State Reserve, New South Wales, and Phillip Island

From the leading lady’s Samantha Sang hairdo to the leading man’s short-shorts, Long Weekend looks every bit the 1977 film it is. But that doesn't mean it feels dated, nor does it prevent this Aussie import from still being one of the best of the Crimes Against Nature genre flicks. A timeless timepiece of suspense and retribution whose cautionary-tale take on the perils of pushing nature too far is (sadly) as relevant now as when it was made.

BONUS MATERIAL
Long Weekend was remade in 2008 by director Jamie Blanks from a screenplay by original screenwriter Everett De Roche. An Australian production that I believe went direct-to-video in the States (where it was given the awful title Nature's Grave).

This entertainingly faithful remake (down to duplicate shots and dialogue)

 stars Jim Caviezel and Claudia Karvan.

Screenwriter Everett De Roche makes a cameo appearance in the 2008 remake as a pub
patron at the Eggleston Hotel, named for original Long Weekend director Colin Eggleston

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