The Cars That Ate Paris
The Cars That Ate Paris is a 1974 film from Australia, directed by Peter Weir, running 87 minutes. reelscum files it under Ozploitation and carsploitation.
- Year
- 1974 · 1970s films
- Country
- Australia
- Runtime
- 87 min
- Director
- Peter Weir
- Updated
- 29 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- cult (35/100)
- Also known as
- The Cars That Eat People
Defined in the glossary: Ozploitation, Carsploitation
Peter Weir's debut. A town that farms car crashes. Very strange.
Peter Weir's feature debut, and one of the strangest films of the Australian new wave. The isolated town of Paris deliberately causes car crashes to loot the wreckage and the survivors, and a traumatised drifter gets trapped in its economy of violence. The tone hovers between black comedy and genuine unease.
Weir shoots it as a deadpan nightmare, and the spiked Volkswagen that becomes the film's icon points toward the vehicular carnage the country would later specialise in. It is far odder than a killer-car film.
An eccentric, unsettling start to a major career.
Trailer
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Written about
- Ozploitation: the Australian genre boom, 1971 to 1986
An adults-only certificate, a tax loophole, and a Melbourne doctor who knew what happens to bodies at speed. Australia's fifteen years of cheap, mean, brilliant genre film.
The cycle in depth
- Wake in Fright is not an exploitation film
It was lost for thirty years, found in a bin marked 'for destruction', and it is the best thing on this site.
On these lists
- Essential Ozploitation
Australia spent fifteen years making films about the country trying to kill you. These are the ones that meant it.
Filed alongside
Road Games
Rear Window in a truck, with Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis.
Mad Max 2
The template the whole Italian post-nuke cycle copied for a decade.
Mad Max
Made for nothing on public roads. You can feel every dollar missing.
Stunt Rock
No plot. A stuntman and a prog band. Exists purely so Grant Page can work.
White Lightning
Burt Reynolds, moonshine, and the blueprint for a decade of Southern comedy.
Dirty Mary Crazy Larry
Ninety minutes of driving and one of cinema's great abrupt endings.
The Man from Hong Kong
Jimmy Wang Yu wrecks Sydney, with hang-gliding and a man actually on fire. Peak crossover.
Razorback
A giant pig film shot like a perfume ad. Somehow works.
Gone in 60 Seconds
93 cars destroyed for real. The director broke his own ankles. Worth it.
Race with the Devil
Satanists chase a Winnebago across Texas. Better than that sounds.
White Line Fever
Trucker versus the cartel. Earnest, blue-collar, better than expected.
Wake in Fright
A masterpiece and an ordeal. The kangaroo hunt is real footage and it is unbearable.