Long Weekend (1978) d. Colin Eggleston (Australia)
“A bickering young couple’s weekend at an isolated beach resort turns into a nightmarish struggle between Man and Nature.” With that description, and considering the time-stamp and the genre, one might be forgiven for expecting another run-of-the-mill “When Animals Attack” flick, full of egregiously over-the-top warnings of how the human species has run its course as top of the food chain, thanks to centuries of ecological abuse and neglect. While American ex-pat screenwriter Everett de Roche (Patrick, Razorback) isn’t averse to hammering home the point on occasion through scenes of reckless use of weaponry and thoughtless littering, the casually caustic behavior seems somehow more authentic than, say, Frogs’ opening credits shots of beer cans floating in the Florida swamps. Rather than broadly drawn clichés, with our top-billed hero providing the requisite liberal voice of reason, Roche’s bipedal characters are fragile, careless, bullying, insecure, and genuinely confused as to how their choices led them here. In other words, human.
