This is one of those very early works of a promising young artist who has decided to make his first shot about, well, everything. There's ambition and some talent, but ultimately it is too rough on pretty much every level to rise above a curiosity for Peter Weir completists. I wouldn't go so far as to call it bad, it's too interesting in its individual moments to be dismissed like that, but it's not exactly something I would recommend.
A group of people come to the island hunting resort of Homesdale. Most prominent of these guests is the only one who hasn't been before, Mr. Malfry (Geoff Malone), a young, inexperienced man who is obviously out of place amidst people like Mr. Kevin (Grahame Bond), a part-time butcher and part-time rock star, Miss Greenoak (Kate Fitzpatrick), and Mr. Vaughn (Barry Donnelly), along with a few others. They are greeted by the manager (James Dellit) who meets everything with a toothy grin.
The actual point of this getaway is masked by the film's pretentious symbolism and metaphor that it's unclear what it's supposed to be on a literal sense. It doesn't seem relaxing, like when the oldest member of the bunch, Mr. Levy (James Lear), accidentally shoots and kills one of the staff only for another member of the staff to essentially laugh it off as nothing but a dirty little secret between them. There's a treasure hunt that seems designed to humiliate them, like when Miss Greenoak happens across a disfigured man in the forest whom she ends up snogging for...reasons, or when Mr. Malfry follows instructions on a rock and ends up hanging upside down from a rope in a tree.
There's also some kind of talent show late in the film where each guest is supposed to present themselves somehow. Mr. Kevin plays his music. Miss Greenoak makes fun of the war-scarred German woman Mrs. Sharpe (Doreen Warburton) before singing. In the middle of all of this is Mr. Malfry, berated more than once by the manager for not being into it enough, for not fitting in or being popular.
The film ends curiously with Miss Greenoak finally giving into Mr. Kevin's advances, sleeping with him, and then sneaking out to bring in the entire staff to...make fun of him? I guess? It's unclear because no one is clear about their actions or motives anyway in the film, and, in addition, it all gets cut short because Mr. Malfry ends up revealing himself to be deranged in a way that cuts the fun short.
Why does this place of Homesdale exist? It seems to me like it's a way for the staff to make fun of its clientele with too much money and then recruit for their own ranks from their guests, finding the most homicidal to join them. It's a problem with storytelling that takes metaphor and symbolism above actual storytelling. The surface ends up making so little sense that it's hard to actually engage with it because there's so much time wondering how these pieces fit together.
That being said, there are pretty consistently amusing little pieces. Weir, who co-wrote the film with Piers Davies, seems to have had a very black and dry sense of humor as a young man, and there are visual gags throughout that produce small guffaws. The playing of the humor is deadpan flat, more than once reminding me of Monty Python from the other side of the globe a few years earlier.
So, the symbolism, which feels really political on some level that I can't grasp because I don't live in Australia during the early 70s, and it seems like the political points are all designed to appeal to those living in Australia in the early 70s. I just don't know the paradigm outside of the moment Mr. Vaughn blindfolds both Mr. Malfry and Mr. Kevin, labeling one as the Communist and the other as the Australian, and then having them play a game where they try to light small sticks of explosives strapped to the bottom of toy fighter jets. It's obviously supposed to say something about manipulating people using political labels, but that's just the most generic of the examples. Is there something about Mr. Kevin's dual life as a butcher and rock star? Maybe. I dunno. It does provide some brief moments of humor, though.
If I were a film producer and a young filmmaker showed this to me, I wouldn't kick him out of my office. I also wouldn't give him a job. I'd probably invite him to a short conversation about what he wanted to do with the film and what he failed to do with it, hoping to give him some direction he could use on his next project. I wouldn't want to stop him from working, but I wouldn't be ready to work with him yet. There's promise, but he's got a long way to go before he realizes it.
