Peter Weir made his directorial debut with this truly bizarre and unique blackly humorous multi-genre pastiche that's a compellingly novel and singular blend of horror, Western and sci-fi conventions mixed together into a jarringly offbeat whole.<br /><br />A pleasant, mild-mannered American tourist (a sweetly amiable performance by Terry Camilleri) finds himself trapped in a remote backwoods Australian hamlet after he narrowly survives a car crash. The naive, gullible yank soon discovers that things are not exactly quite right and okay in the deceptively sleepy burg. For starters, that car crash wasn't an accident; it was deliberately staged by the resourceful and enterprising townspeople who eke out a living by salvaging car parts from wrecked vehicles. Then there's a resident mad scientist who's fond of experimenting on car crash survivors, turning the hapless folks into mute lobotomized imbeciles called "veggies." And the local drag-racing teenage hooligans are getting increasingly out of control, carousing about in their lethal, garishly made-up cars (one sports spikes all along its body like a porcupine!) until the wee hours of the morning and making a real nuisance of themselves. The town's friendly, but ineffectual mayor (winningly played by John Mellion) offers Camilleri the plum job of parking superintendent in a desperate attempt to restore law and order.<br /><br />The quirky, imaginative script by Weir, Keith Gow and Piers David ingeniously uses the oddball premise as an ideal springboard for barbed social commentary on the perils of cross country traveling, the very modern dangers the automobile poses to quiet everyday life, how isolated communities cut off from the rest of civilization can easily degenerate into barbarism and lawlessness, the extreme measures impoverished people will resort to in order to get by in life, and even a wacky generation gap conflict pitting uptight, disciplined, morally rigid adults against rowdy, uninhibited nihilist youth. Weirs' direction is precariously pitched between the grimly horrific and the darkly facetious, boldly maintaining an uneasy tone which keeps the viewer constantly off guard and gives the irregular proceedings a potently unsettling weirded-out edge. John McLean's grainy, luridly grungy cinematography allows the Australian outback to take on a scary, nightmarishly surreal aura while Bruce Smeaton's sometimes dissonant, more often strangely jaunty rock-tinged score adds substantially to the pervasively unnerving nuttiness. An authentically grotesque and intriguing one-of-a-kind curio.