peter weir make his directorial debut with this truly bizarre and unique blackly humorous multi genre pastiche that a compellingly novel and singular blend of horror and western and sci fi convention mixed together into a jarringly offbeat whole . a pleasant and mild mannered american tourist ( a sweetly amiable performance by terry camilleri ) find himself trap in a remote backwoods australian hamlet after he narrowly survive a car crash . the naive and gullible yank soon discovers that thing be not exactly quite right and okay in the deceptively sleepy burg . for starter and that car crash wasn not an accident while it be deliberately stag by the resourceful and enterprising townspeople who eke out a living by salvage car part from wrecked vehicle . then there a resident mad scientist who fond of experiment on car crash survivor and turn the hapless folk into mute lobotomized imbecile call veggie . and the local drag race teenage hooligan be get increasingly out of control and carouse about in their lethal and garishly make up car ( one sport spike all along it body like a porcupine . ) until the wee hour of the morning and make a real nuisance of themselves . the town friendly and but ineffectual mayor ( winningly play by john mellion ) offer camilleri the plum job of park superintendent in a desperate attempt to restore law and order . the quirky and imaginative script by weir and keith gow and pier david ingeniously use the oddball premise a an ideal springboard for barb social commentary on the peril of cross country travel and the very modern danger the automobile pose to quiet everyday life and how isolated community cut off from the rest of civilization can easily degenerate into barbarism and lawlessness and the extreme measure impoverish people will resort to in order to get by in life and and even a wacky generation gap conflict pit uptight and disciplined and morally rigid adult against rowdy and uninhibited nihilist youth . weirs direction be precariously pitch between the grimly horrific and the darkly facetious and boldly maintain an uneasy tone which keep the viewer constantly off guard and give the irregular proceeding a potently unsettle weirded out edge . john mclean grainy and luridly grungy cinematography allow the australian outback to take on a scary and nightmarishly surreal aura while bruce smeaton sometimes dissonant and more often strangely jaunty rock ting score add substantially to the pervasively unnerving nuttiness . an authentically grotesque and intrigue one of a kind curio .