Gosh, Lord. Sometimes you work in ways that are totally incomprehensible.
Anybody who rents (or otherwise acquires) 1974's The Cars That Ate Paris expecting it to be your typical '70s horror/exploitation fare is bound to come away disappointed. Sure, the poster/cover image of the spike-covered car seems to promise Mad Max-style mayhem -- and the film does deliver on that to an extent -- but all one has to do is notice that it was written and directed by Peter Weir (one year before he made the hypnotic Picnic at Hanging Rock) to realize it isn't going to be quite so easily pigeon-holed.
Working from an original story, Weir paints a warped portrait of an insular community in rural Australia that bases its entire economy around causing auto wrecks and picking up the pieces afterwards. Not all of the survivors are treated equally, though. While most are subjected to surgical experimentation at the hands of sinister doctor Kevin Miles, a select few are allowed to become part of the community with all of their faculties intact. At the very least, that's the situation hapless stranger Terry Camilleri finds himself in after his brother has a fatal accident, stranding him in Paris. Mayor John Meillon is eager to welcome him into the fold, but the town has a youth problem to match its high rate of traffic accidents, and when Camilleri tries to leave town on foot he finds the road barred by the local toughs, who try to make their salvaged vehicles as intimidating-looking as possible.
At every stage, Camilleri's integration into Parisian society is a work in progress. At first he's given a job as a medical orderly at the hospital, but he quits in disgust after one day. Then Meillon makes him parking superintendent, but that's a position with no real authority and puts him right in the middle of the long-simmering conflict between the town's elders and their barely tolerated offspring, who are in the habit of skipping Sunday services to have their weekly demolition derby. Camilleri starts distancing himself again, though, after village idiot Bruce Spence (one of Miles's former patients) demonstrates just how bloodthirsty everyone in town is no matter how innocent they may seem. All he has to do then is overcome his crippling fear of driving and avoid becoming another statistic during the orgy of violence and destruction that erupts during the town's Pilgrim's Ball. Considering how stultifying it is, you can hardly blame the perpetrators for crashing the party.