Long Weekend

There are a lot of extras on this DVD release – indeed, enough to fill the entire second disc included in the set. Leaving aside the conspicuous absence of a director's audio commentary to provide a much-needed synoptic perspective, what is missing here is the sure hand of an editor - which is ironic given director Jamie Blanks' own skill in this field.

At least the 40 minutes of behind-the-scenes footage that make up the 'director's production diary' benefits from an explanatory voice-over by Blanks himself, who reveals that the original film's DP Vincent Monton returned to work in the remake's second unit, and that the 'performance-driven' nature of this two-hander prompted him for the first time in his career to let the actors dictate the film's blocking and framing. The Making-Of Long Weekend covers similar ground, but is essentially 30 minutes of production meetings and location footage, without a commentary to make it engaging to watch – even if it is unusual to see a film's writer (Everett De Roche) so actively involved on set.

And so it goes on. Taming The Wild takes ten minutes to profile the different animals that had to be wrangled for the film, but lacks any shape or direction, again owing largely to the absence of a guiding voice. Peter's Death – Behind-The- Scenes With Grant Page and Roger Ward anatomises the different stages of filming the male protagonist's last moments and, as though to compensate for the lack of a voice-over, features interviews with oldschool stunt coordinator Grant Page (who rose to prominence in the profession with the original Mad Max) and veteran Ozploitation actor Roger Ward (Stone, The Man From Hong Kong, Mad Max, Turkey Shoot) – but at 22 minutes, it is a case of too little information spread over too much time. The two-minute deleted scene of Peter delivering a monologue to a flock of ducks is of interest only for actor James Caviezel's sustained vocal impression of Christopher Walken - but it is a scene that simply could never have made it into the final cut without derailing the film's sombre tone.

Best by far is the gallery of interviews. Claudia Karvan alludes to the pains she took to avoid making Carla's rage and disappointment seem repetitive (something which was definitely a fault of the original film), and praises Blanks for being "really tuned to performance". Writer De Roche claims that he wrote the original Long Weekend out of "boredom" when he was supposed to be working on a TV series, and describes how he "just tweaked a few little things" for the remake's screenplay – including making the couple's bickering less constant. Finally Toby Eggleston, son of the late Colin, discusses his cinephile father's aspirations to transform film language with the original, especially through its pioneering use of steadicam. It is, Toby suggests, "a piece of video art", whose very title was fully intended by Colin to evoke Jean-Luc Godard's cannibal apocalypse Week End (1967) - although Toby readily concedes that at the time of its release, Long Weekend's environmental concerns and savage demolition of a bourgeois couple "didn't click with Australia's ideas about itself". If only the other extras had been as insightful and fascinating as this.