The Cars That Ate Paris

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.