Nature’s Grave

Jamie Blanks – 2008 – Australia

This is a very sorry remake of one of the finest 70s Australian films, Colin Eggleston’s Long Weekend (1978), a symbolic and contemplative film that is often herded into the “Ozploitation” or at least into the general “man-versus-nature” horror subgenres.  Aside from its ripe-with-potential premise – (a bickering city couple vacation in the wild and are seemingly terrorized by the natural surroundings) – the main thing that is of any interest about this version is the fact that it was made using virtually the same screenplay by Everett De Roche; (I have been unable to learn if De Roche even wrote a new script as credited, but whatever changes there are between the original and remake seem to be minor).  While the intention was certainly to honor the much-respected Eggleston film or even to assure the financiers and the audience that a good film must result from a good script, the result is actually a pretty enlightening lesson in filmmaking practices.  Comparing the two films side-by-side, it’s apparent that the original has a charge of excitement, creativity and concern running through it that survives from its makers to the audience, while the remake is a dot-to-dot tracing that comes off simply as arrogant and incredibly lazy.  Lacking the nerve to explore any new ideas, the filmmakers seem content to play it safe to a dogmatic degree while also hoping that their efforts will somehow be equal to or better than the original.  Movies like this get made not because any actual artists had a dream to make something, but because a lazy producer with dollar signs in his pupils assumed that updating a good film for a modern audience is something that film lovers, or audiences in general, are looking for, and there isn’t a lot of evidence that this is the case.