Michael Walter’s film Have A Nice Weekend (1975) opens with kids playing football. The camera pans and tracks the little players. The setting is idyllic with trees golden yellow and red. It’s a perfect autumn setting and the images are dreamy and ethereal. But all of this changes drastically as the film shifts gears and becomes a proto-slasher.
The story begins when Chris comes home from Vietnam. The tortured and psychologically unstable Chris summons his family to their isolated summer home on an island to share some “news”. He is haunted by images from his time in Vietnam. This is demonstrated with flashbacks to stills of the war. But once everyone is there the killing starts; beginning with the caretaker and then Chris.
Walter’s film is tightly plotted and handles misdirection surprisingly well. With little details Walter suggests likely suspects only to turn the story in a completely different direction. This is the case with the gift of the knives and Chris’ trauma. Walter’s writing, steeped in the characters’ petty jealousies, clearly owes more than a little to the star studded “whodunnits” of the fifties and sixties.
It’s the presence of gore and the general sense of suspense that place Have A Nice Weekend firmly in the slasher tradition. The killer is never seen, only the tools for murder are ever glimpsed. In a way Have A Nice Weekend is shares a number of formal features with the Italian giallo genre.
What makes this film so watchable is its setting and ambient atmosphere. The location photography is gorgeous and evocative. The images of the exterior locations are so idyllic that they juxtapose harshly with the plot and its violence. It’s a pairing that links the beauty of nature with the cruelty of man.
Then there is the epilogue. It’s a single scene tagged onto the end of the film that asks for a feminist reading to the murders. This reactionary sequence is at odds with the tone of the film and is damaging to the expert pacing thus far. It undermines everything that came before it and feels very cheap.
