Film Summary CDXII (The Cars that Ate Paris)

I went into this movie expecting a possessed car plot. You know the types, a car gets an evil soul in it or somebody brains transferred into the car. Or there's just a vehicle driving around being a menace to begin with.
But instead we got something akin to the Wicker Man movie. It's the strange little town that purposely causes car collisions on its back roads. So they can scrap the vehicles, steal the clothing off of the people and presumably keep their crappy economy alive with other folks Goods.

So the film has a protagonist, Arthur. He and his brother were driving through this town in the middle of night and where the unfortunate victims of one of the set up ''accidents''.
Arthur survived the crash with no major injuries. And I guess the townsfolk decide to keep him? Or maybe it's just the mayor. Instead of sticking him in the mental Asylum where all the other people who survived the car crashes resign or just killing the guy, they want to make him part of their little Society.
And as one can imagine Arthur is not that interested. He just wants to get out of this weird place and move on with his life. But he's convinced to stay both through manipulation, falsifying medical records and light intimidation.
He has a bunch of different jobs, interacts with various townsfolk (some of which disappear). And tries to leave the town several times. Eventually he'll end up escaping the town when he's able to get over his fear of driving. But at this point he could have easily walked out of the town as the entire thing had broken down from a raid caused by the youth.

I'm not sure what this movie wants to be. At first it comes off as a small town cult movie, then it devolves into a western, then it turns into this weird Motocross movie and then you're just left with nothing.
Like the residents of the town the film decides to abandon whatever story it was trying to tell and just kind of has everybody leave.
That is except for the mayor, he's the only person that's interested in seeing this town survive. Everyone else just either seems to be maintaining their life, abusing the town's unique situation or trying to destroy it.

There's a doctor who likes to perform medical examinations and experimentation on all the people they get from these crash sites.
Then there's the youth who spend their days customising cars out of all the spare parts from the crash sites and then drive around aimlessly causing Mayhem and chaos.

There's this on power Dynamic that starts to unfold in the middle of the film. Where he have the mayor and the townsfolk on one side trying to maintain this sense of false order versus the youth who are out and out psychotic and crazy.
This is also where the film starts turning into a western. All the kids are dressed up like cowboys and Prospectors from old John Wayne movies.

It's a weird film, it tricks you into thinking it's going to be some Supernatural event involving this strange spiky car going around harassing people in the dead of night. Like a werewolf made of metal.

Arthur is the prime example of a 1970s protagonist. In where he's technically the focus of the film but only so much as he can observe the world around him. He's your fish out of water character.
But he's given little to no actual character of his own. He's left relatively blank, we know as much about him at the beginning of the film as we do at the end.
The closest thing he gets to any character development is when we learn that he was sentenced to manslaughter after accidentally killing a man on the street with his car. This leads into a whole thing about his fear of driving and the fact that he's not legally allowed to drive anymore. So he can't really escape the town. Until the end of the film where he eventually conquered he's fear.