The Cars that Ate Paris (Peter Weir, 1974)

Peter Weir's first feature, following several short films for Australian public television, is a fine example of three of my favorite kinds of movies: a simmering, slow burn of dread and unease in the 1970s leavened by moments of dark humor and silliness; a general category I like to call "Australian weirdness" (hard to define, but you know it when you see it); and those movies where an entire small town is up to something sinister and odd. Weir made several good movies in Hollywood, but if you're a depraved weirdo like me (if you're reading this, you probably are), you prefer his Australian films. They're stranger, scarier, and have a lot more indefinable atmosphere.

The Cars that Ate Paris opens with a red herring pre-credit sequence that has little to do with the rest of the film but everything to do with its tone. It captures the film's darkness, humor, wild twists and turns, and fascination with/fear of the automobile. I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen it. The credits roll with brothers Arthur Waldo (Terry Camilleri) and George Waldo (Rick Scully) driving their caravan (camper to us Americans) through small towns in the outback looking for work. Turning toward the little town of Paris after seeing a sign promising work, the brothers get in a nasty car accident seemingly orchestrated by Paris residents. George dies in the wreck, but Arthur survives with minor injuries.

After recovering, Arthur undergoes some brainwashing and intimidation tactics meant to keep him in Paris permanently. This is a relatively simple task, because Arthur is a very gentle, passive, easily led guy, the total opposite of actor Camilleri's most famous role, Napoleon in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Paris is sort of like the Hotel California (Arthur makes repeated attempts to head out of town after being told he could leave, only to be thwarted each time). How it's different from the Hotel California is that almost no one checks in.

The people in the town of Paris, an isolated, economically battered little burg, have a scam to make ends meet. The roads leading into town have been armed with traps, causing cars to plunge into the hillside. These accidents are almost always fatal, though the town hospital is full of survivors who fall into three categories: "full, half, and quarter veggie." Arthur is one of the only outsiders to join the town as a functioning citizen. The deliberate wrecks are then picked clean for whatever the townspeople can salvage, including scrap metal, money, and possessions.

Though the town survives through murder, mayhem, and theft, the majority of the residents present a polite, civilized veneer of normally functioning society, with the benevolent dictatorship of The Mayor (John Meillon) a darkly funny parody of civic engagement, faux-democracy, and political blowhardism, his speeches a semi-coherent mishmash of half-remembered quotes from famous world leaders, small-town folksiness, and nationalistic rabble-rousing. With The Cars that Ate Paris, Meillon was in three of the best Australian films of the '70s, the other two being Wake in Fright and Walkabout. He was also in the first two Crocodile Dundee movies. (I have to briefly digress and include one of the most unintentionally funny bits of IMDB trivia, from Meillon's page: "He pronounced his surname as Mee-Lon, although the misguided public pronounced it Mell-Yun." Damn you, misguided public!)

A dangerous young subculture is thriving in Paris, making The Mayor nervous and challenging his power. A group of young men who dress like they're in a western movie salvage some of the wrecked cars and turn them into souped-up demolition-derby art-car killing machines, leaving them parked wherever they want, raising hell, and intimidating anyone who gets in their way. The Mayor, who has taken Arthur under his wing (there are some great scenes between Arthur and The Mayor's wife Beth (Melissa Jaffer)), establishes Arthur as a parking inspector in a feeble attempt to get the fearsome cars out of the way. When this plan fails, The Mayor and the town policeman make an example of one of the car gang, setting up a showdown between the competing Paris factions that comes to a head on the night of the town's totally bonkers costume ball.

Because of the insanely dark times we're currently living in, I couldn't help but see certain parallels to the United States of today in The Cars that Ate Paris. The U.S. as a sick, isolated country whose citizens can't leave its borders, afraid and resentful of outsiders yet willing to sacrifice and exploit them. The Mayor and the town's old guard as Reagan Republicans, killing and stealing from the vulnerable while covering it all in politeness, folksiness, and the appearance of a functioning society. The young car gang as Trump Republicans, smashing up and destroying everything as a show of power for its own sake, owning the town taking the place of owning the libs, just as bloodthirsty as the old order but turning that bloodthirstiness into an open, brazen virtue. Just as Reaganism led to Trumpism, The Mayor and his cronies paved the way for the gang of car nuts destroying the town, whether they like it or not.

OK, back to the movie. Weir's film is full of memorable images, great scenes, and a skillful amplification of tension, with lots of darkly funny gags and unpredictable moments. George Miller paid tribute to Weir's film in his Mad Max movies by borrowing the spiked design of the most memorable car and casting Bruce Spence, who plays the mentally disturbed young man Charlie in this film. There's something about the landscapes of rural Australia in the '70s and '80s that make them a perfect location for tales of dread, isolation, horror, mysticism, and madness.

Weir followed up The Cars that Ate Paris with his masterpiece Picnic at Hanging Rock, a memorably eerie story of schoolgirls who mysteriously disappeared on a school trip to the rock formation. That film builds on The Cars that Ate Paris's affinity for landscape and atmosphere, and though it's not as wonderfully berserk, its chilling unease stayed with me longer. His Australian period continued with supernatural Aboriginal murder mystery The Last Wave, horror film for Australian television The Plumber, and war movie Gallipoli. He transitioned to his Hollywood career with an Australian/American coproduction, The Year of Living Dangerously, an offbeat political thriller/romance/action hybrid starring Sigourney Weaver, Mel Gibson, and Linda Hunt playing a man. He was less prolific in Hollywood, but his films here include Witness, The Mosquito Coast, Green Card, Fearless, The Truman Show, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and the immensely popular but cloyingly sentimental Dead Poets Society. If you have a teacher who loves that movie, run away. Weir hasn't directed a film since 2010's The Way Back. I hope he's happily enjoying retirement and not frustratedly attempting to get another film made in a Hollywood culture uninterested in anything that's not a superhero or Star Wars movie, because, Dead Poets Society aside, Weir makes good stuff.

Night of Terror (Ben Stoloff, 1933)

Though Night of Terror is only 62 minutes long, it's completely stuffed with characters, events, and storylines, including an escaped serial-killing maniac, a scientist planning an experiment that will bury him alive for eight hours, a planned wedding, a potential love triangle, a rivalry between a newspaper reporter and the chief of police, a clairvoyant gypsy servant and her non-clairvoyant husband (played by Bela Lugosi), a series of murders in a mansion that may or may not be committed by the maniac, a contested will, conflict between the multiple heirs in the will, a seance, a race against the clock, hidden passageways, one of the first spoiler alert warnings in cinema history, and some absolutely cringe-inducing 1930s-style racism.

Night of Terror has plenty of entertaining moments but is a fairly mediocre film overall. Most of the story elements and character traits are '30s cliches, though some of the cast members deliver their underwritten parts with style and personality. Stoloff is a perfunctory visual stylist, at least in this film, anticipating the flatter images of television a couple decades ahead of time. The film mostly comes alive in the moments when the actors can give it some juice, and the handful of outdoor shots have a nice, creepy atmosphere.

The film begins with an escaped maniac killing a couple who had been parked in the woods to make out and gaze at the stars from their convertible. This scene looks remarkably like a scene from a much later slasher film, except for the camera pulling away before the bloodshed. The maniac (drinking game: take a shot every time someone in the cast says "maniac;" proceed to nearest hospital) leaves a calling card on his victims -- a newspaper headline pinned to the body. 

The evening's double murder has taken place uncomfortably close to the Rinehart estate. Patriarch Richard (Tully Marshall) is an esteemed scientist and scholar, and he is sharing the estate with his science professor nephew (?)/future son-in-law (?) Arthur Hornsby (George Meeker), his daughter (?)/ward (?)/woman engaged to his nephew (?) Mary (Sally Blane), his gypsy servants Degar (Bela Lugosi) and Sika (Mary Frey), and his chauffeur Martin (Oscar Smith), a black character given much racist treatment. About Arthur and Mary. Based on the dialogue, they are possibly: (1) blood-related cousins who are going to marry each other; (2) the nephew of Richard marrying a ward of the state who has been given shelter by Richard; (3) Richard's mentee who considers Richard an avuncular figure but is not related to him marrying Richard's daughter (or ward raised as his daughter); or (4) who the hell knows? Whatever the case, Arthur seems much more interested in his experiments than in the company of his fiancee, and Mary and Tom Hartley (Wallace Ford), a fast-talking newspaper reporter covering the killings, have a strong mutual attraction, though Mary unconvincingly pretends otherwise.

Arthur has chosen this night to test his fantastic new serum, which will allow human beings to survive without oxygen. Arthur will be buried alive and revived the following morning, with a team of scientists and science professors verifying his experiment. Meanwhile, Sika, a clairvoyant, predicts much death and sorrow heading the household's way. Into this roiling, complicated stew of interpersonal drama drops the maniac. As characters are picked off one by one, the scientists, the gypsies, Tom Hartley, the police, and Richard's brother and sister-in-law get dragged into the action. The usual '30s business ensues, followed by a twist ending, followed by one of the actors in character warning audiences not to reveal the twist to anyone who hasn't seen the movie yet. 

In a decade loaded with classic horror, Night of Terror is not even an also-ran. At least it's not boring, though top-billed Lugosi isn't given much to do outside of a few fleetingly great moments. One thing I really enjoyed, though, was a verbal tic by both Richard and the chief of police. When either man was annoyed by something another character said to them, they responded with an irritated "ehhhhhhhh." I'm going to work that into my repertoire. 

I'm not familiar with the rest of director Stoloff's filmography, but many of their titles seem like titles TV writers would come up with if they needed some fake '20s'-'40s movie names. For example: Play Ball with Babe Ruth, Stolen Sweeties, Say It with Flour, Papa's Darling, Plastered in Paris, Speakeasy, New Movietone Follies of 1930, Soup to Nuts, Palooka, Swellhead, Three Sons o' Guns, and It's a Joke, Son!  

Violence in a Women's Prison aka Caged Women (Bruno Mattei, 1982)

I don't know if it's because of my intense interest in independent, exploitation, and '70s and '80s genre films or because of some hidden darkness in my soul, but, against my better judgment, I tend to enjoy women-in-prison movies and movies where a vigilante or a rogue cop administers illegal street justice to flamboyant criminals despite finding many of the elements of these films politically or ethically at odds with my value system. I'll set aside the vigilante movies for now to focus on this week's film, a "classic" example of the women's prison genre.

Violence in a Women's Prison has most of the genre's requirements in place. An island prison in a geographically ambiguous location full of beautiful women, evil lesbians, sadistic guards and wardens with severely pulled-back hair who appear to be on the clock 24/7, a wise old inmate who has seen it all, a new prisoner with a mysterious background who becomes a target of the warden, ample nudity, cruel and unusual punishment, riots, fights, gross-out scenes (in this case involving a bucket of shit and a solitary cell infested by huge rats), attempted escapes, and methodically planned revenge schemes. Veteran schlock director Bruno Mattei presents it all with style, a pretty decent pace, and much tastelessness.

An Italian-French co-production filmed in a studio in Rome, set in Brazil, and dubbed in English, Violence in a Women's Prison is also an installment of the Black Emanuelle series, a spinoff of the softcore Emanuelle franchise (if these films came out in our stupid present, they'd probably be called the Emanuelleverse because everything's a fuckin' universe to today's nerds; they're just sequels, people, not a damn universe, please grow up). The Black Emanuelle spinoffs star Laura Gemser (who is Indonesian, not Black, but the first film was called Black Emanuelle anyway) as another Emanuelle, whose work as an embedded journalist advocating for human rights constantly puts her in both dangerous and erotic situations.

In this film, Emanuelle is given a phony background as a sex worker who killed her pimp and the phony name Laura Kendall so she can be sent to the weirdo island prison and expose the abuses going on there. Once inside, she is ordered to strip naked for the prison doctor to examine her. We think the doctor is going to be some drooling pervert, but he turns out to be a decent guy who is also a prisoner at the men's lockdown next door.

Dr. Moran (played by Gemser's real-life husband Gabriele Tinti) is in jail for the mercy killing of his dying wife. He's been appointed prison doctor, with attendant light security privileges, because the head warden (Lorraine De Selle) has the hots for him. The warden is also sleeping with the prison's chief inspector and head of the men's prison (Jacques Stany), a guy who cosplays in fascist military regalia and looks remarkably like indie-film irritant Henry Jaglom, in her stained-glass windowed bedroom chambers, which also provide her with a vantage point to watch women prisoners who violate the rules be attacked by male prisoners in a hidden room.

The other major villains include the head guard, Rescaut (Franca Stoppi, star of weirdo Italian horror film Beyond the Darkness, which I reviewed a few months ago). While the head warden handles the heterosexual manipulations and tortures, Rescaut works the lesbian angles, using a prisoner named Hertha (Francoise Perrot) as her spy and muscle. Besides the sexual mind games and abuse, the prison staff also require hard labor that had been outlawed for years, are quick to brandish their clubs, and have all kinds of other freaky methods and tortures to keep the prisoners in line. The women also never seem to be allowed to use the prison yard, a privilege only the male prisoners get.

As Dr. Moran and Emanuelle grow closer and several of the prisoners concoct a plan to get their comeuppance on the abusive prison staff, the warden and the chief inspector discover Emanuelle's real identity. A scheme is hatched, a letter is smuggled out thanks to seemingly the only guy on the island who is neither a prisoner nor a prison employee (a sombrero-wearing farmer named Miguel), and a race against time begins. Of course Dr. Moran and Emanuelle take a break from this race against the clock to have some poorly timed hot sex, putting their entire plan in jeopardy, but the heart wants what it wants, to paraphrase a famous creep.

I mostly enjoy this film, but I do not respect my enjoyment. Aw jeez, I'm being too hard on myself. This is peak Eurotrash cinema, and Mattei knows how to make a nice, fat slice of exploitation cheese. Gemser is extremely beautiful and charismatic, the cast of genre vets know how to ride the line between camp and seriousness, the rat scene is truly creepy, and the action moves along at a brisk clip. The country is controlled by monstrous pigs wrecking our lives for power and profit. I think I can enjoy a women's prison movie without beating myself up.