Long Weekend (aka Nature's Grave)

When a couple with no regard for nature go on a camping trip, nature fights back.

This was always going to be a hard sell; I think it's important in a horror movie to have at least one victim or would be victim who's a least a bit likeable OR make a hero killer type movie (where you root for the murderer and everyone else is just machete fodder). In the case of 'long weekend' , there is no 'killer' as such - just a bunch of pissed of animals, but in order for nature to want to kill them, they had to be a pair of arseholes.

And arse-holes they are, one of the first things the woman does in the entire movie, is empty 3 big tins of dogfood into a dish, so that she can leave the dog alone for a 3 day weekend, because she doesn't 'feel right' asking a neighbour to look after her!

From there our 'heroes' proceed to run over a wallaby, throw a lit fag out of a car window, practice shooting glass bottles which they have thrown into the ocean, chop down a healthy tree in a wild forrest for firewood and (best of all) having heard a crying noise, and then finding a dead baby seal (actually a sea cow, but they think its a seal) they shoot at (and kill) the large dark shape moving in the water because they don't know what it is!

The icing on the cake though, is that after all of that, the guy goes nuts at his wife for breaking an egg!

So, we have a pair of tossers, whom we would be more than happy to see offed, and yet it takes 45mins (of a fairly short 80 min movie) before things start going seriously wrong for them.

Aside from some pacing and sympathy issues though, it's not a bad film, it's just not a great one either. When things do start happening it's fairly well paced, there's some genuinely creepy stuff with the seacow's body, and the last death in the film is superb, but I can't help but think that the movie would have benefited from a larger cast (say, a small group rather than a couple) with a couple of unfortunate reasonable types who are jut caught in the crossfire, and a shorter first 2 acts.

I've just found out that the movie is a remake - I may check out the original at some point to see if the overall pace was any better...