Wheaton's Law...

Clearly Jim Caviezel's character Peter in Long Weekend is unaware of Wheaton's Law because he is simply, and unrepentantly, one of the biggest dicks I've had the displeasure of encountering.

My best mate Paul was down for the afternoon yesterday and so we saw this as a great excuse to dig out the copy of Long Weekend that I recently won in a Dread Central online competition - but hadn't gotten round to watching yet.

We're both fans of trashy horror and so had high expectations of an afternoon's great entertainment as we settled down with drinks, crisps and Minstrels.

Eighty-four minutes later we sat in stunned silence at the awfulness of what we had just endured.

Everyone likes a bit of mystery in their movies and Long Weekend is constantly throwing out freaky teases of odd things going on to Caviezel's objectionable character and his soon-to-be-ex-wife Carla (Claudia Karvan) but nothing is ever explained... or even really hinted at.

Peter and Carla are a feuding couple of Australian city slickers teetering on the edge of divorce after each had an affair and Carla aborted a baby that Peter was convinced was his. For some reason they decide to try and make one last attempt at reconciliation by going camping with a couple of Peter's friends - even though Carla would rather stay in a hotel and has a strong dislike of the outdoors.

They have arranged to meet Peter's friends at an out-of-the-way beech in the bush, but never actually find them and instead end up alone on the isolated beech.

Leaving a trail of litter and dead wildlife behind them, Peter begins taking random potshots at wildlife and abandoned bottles with his father's old hunting rifle while Carla becomes increasingly bored and eager to go to more civilized surroundings.

Lots of weird stuff happens that might have been interesting if it actually meant anything then Peter appears to go mad for no readily apparent reason and the film continues to degenerate into some godawful mess of supposedly environmentally-conscious doomsaying.

Matters aren't helped by the fact that Peter has no redeeming qualities and zero on-screen chemistry with the constantly complaining Carla. He starts off as mildly selfish and arrogant and goes downhill from there, while Carla has little going for her at all (except her looks) leaving the audience with no one to emphasise with or relate to (except maybe Cricket the dog).

There's gore and ickiness aplenty but nothing really amounts to anything. It's all immensely unsubtle with several very on-the-nose metaphorical moments, such as a eagle attacking Peter after Carla smashes its egg or the dead corpse of a sea-cow (a sirenia) slowly making its way up the beach after Peter's discarded plastic bag suffocated its baby, but it's also terribly inconsistent.

If this is supposed to be about "nature striking back", as we got the impression it was, who was cutting the arrows in the tree bark and who kept firing off Peter's speargun?

On the other hand, were we supposed to think that it was all in Peter's head and he'd been mad all along?

And why were the patrons of the roadside bar where Peter called in for directions to the beech all so stereotypically mysterious?

Perhaps I was the last person on the planet to realise what a cruddy and pointless film this was which is why no one entered the competition and I won a copy!

It's rare, even with some of the truly dire films I've seen, that I tell people 'not to bother' because I genuinely believe that 99.99% of movies have at least one inspirational nugget in them, but despite the beautiful Australian scenery and the fine performance by Peter's dog Cricket, there is nothing - and I mean, absolutely, nothing - to recommend about Long Weekend.

So how did we cope with this disappointment?

We proceeded to watch the far superior Final Destination 3 not once but twice through as I discovered my DVD had - as well as the theatrical release - a "choose their destiny" version which allowed the viewer to use his remote control, at key points during the movie, to change what happens.

Paul and I became quite fascinated by this gimmick, even though you only got two choices each time and it only popped up maybe half-a-dozen times during the movie, but we were determined to pursue each new avenue that was created and see how it effected the rest of the movie.

At first we thought it might have been a bit of a con, maybe just changing a few lines of dialogue, but after a while it became clear that there were long sequences of alternate 'reality' that could be accessed through the right (or wrong?) choices.

We were still playing around with this when Rachel came home from work at about 7pm, Long Weekend well and truly forgotten.