The Criterion Channel has just added a collection of Australian New Wave films, of which this is one, and it seemed of a piece with The Birds, so I thought we'd give it a shot. I regret it. Not terribly, but it isn't as good as it's made out to be. Mind you, if I'd seen it late on a Friday night on Channel 4 in the early '80s, it probably would've made a huge impression on me (like similarly dubious spooky films like She Waits or The Shadow of Chikara did). But as it is, I feel it wasted a good premise. It could've easily been a one hour episode of something like Tales of the Unexpected or Hammer House of Horror with a title like "The Dugong". Here's the basics: the main couple (who comprise the entire cast for more than 95% of the film) head off for a camping trip at his behest. She'd much rather be going off with the neighbor couple, with whom, it emerges, they'd been engaging in some partner-swapping, initially (she says) at his suggestion because he fancied the wife, but he got jealous when she got it on with the husband. There's also been a recent abortion, and their sex life has been floundering. So this is his attempt to bring them together. But, let's be honest, apart from the fact that they deserve each other, as neither is remotely likable, they should not be together, because they have nothing in common. Well, except both of them seem to have a contempt for the outdoors, which she manifests by staying in the tent reading trashy novels, and he by going out and shooting things and spreading litter. But let's backtrack: things get off to a bad start when he runs over a kangaroo (in very realistic and upsetting detail). Then they stop off at the Aussie equivalent of the beaten up, shitkicker-staffed general store that is at the beginning of every backwoods horror film, where the locals surprise our hero by not having heard of the beach that he thinks is just 5 miles down the road. They say nobody goes that way any more, and proceed to gawp at the couple's off-road vehicle as it drives off, as if to say that that's the last they'll see of them. Then they struggle to find the beach - they drive down an overgrown track but it gets dark, there are strange animal cries all around, they get a puncture and they keep passing what looks like the same tree. So they end up sleeping in their car. It turns out the next day that they are just yards from the beach, and it is indeed a beauty, and for a brief moment, they stop bickering.
But it doesn't last long, and things keep going wrong. He goes surfing, she sees a black shape in the water near him. He shoots it from the shore.
Later it washes ashore, and it's a dugong, and he thinks some of the more chilling animal cries are its offspring calling for its mother. Then he gets attacked by an eagle (in a moment that isn't any better realized than the bird attacks in
The Birds) which she attributes to her having picked up its egg, so she breaks it (and it's all bloody).
Bizarrely, given all the shooting he's been doing, he objects, and this leads back to the abortion. Later he notices that about a mile down the beach there's another camper van, and after they have bickered enough and been freaked out enough to decide to leave, he insists they visit their fellow campers first. But when they get there, the van is gone, except there's something in the surf that looks like the top of a van. He finds a dog in a tent in a strangely overgrown campsite then returns to find her walking into the surf, apparently driven crazy by strange animal cries.
He pulls her back then swims out to the thing in the surf, and finds that, not only is it the van, but the driver's still in it. Oh, and I've skipped over the strange mold that grows on their defrosted chicken (or "chuck") and a disfigured Barbie doll he finds on the beach.
They return to their campsite to finish packing up but somehow manage to argue so much that she leave him behind and drives off. Meanwhile the corpse of the dugong somehow manages to keep moving closer...
Will they get out alive? SPOILER: I'll tell you at the end. Lots of animals certainly don't, although, perhaps surprisingly, his old dog Cricket (another thing about him she seems to hate) survives. (This is very important, as evidenced by the existence of the website
Does The Dog Die.) What is the message of the film? Well the message I took was that Australians can be really obnoxious, but there's clearly some kind of pro-ecology point, although it's not as if they do really serious polluting (despite her liberal use of the ant spray). Don't shoot dugongs, I guess, which is a message I can certainly get behind. As a film it certainly has some strengths, and as I said, if it had been an hour episode of a horror anthology (something it looks well-suited to, because it's seriously micro-budget) it would have impressed the hell out of adolescent me. But the dialogue is clunky and I really did very quickly want both of them to die. Did they? Well, here's the spoiler: yes. He shoots her with a spear gun by accident, as she crashes the car trying to escape and mistakenly runs back to the campsite where he's sitting, terrified.
Then he runs to the road and sees a truck, whose driver is attacked by a bird (the eagle again?) so he doesn't see him and squashes him flat. This is, I regret to say, the point at which both Jami and I LOL'd in unison. But Cricket, like the dog they found in the abandoned tent, should be fine. (Here are two good contrasting reviews of the film:
positive, and
correct.)
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