Night Bus to Cohuna (1972) – A Retrospective Review of a Forgotten Footnote in Australian Cinema

 

There are films that terrify with blood, guts, and gore. There are films that haunt with ghosts, killers, or monsters. And then there is Night Bus to Cohuna (1972), an oddball entry in the Ozploitation canon whose horror doesn’t come from what lurks in the shadows, but from the relentless weight of boredom itself.

Originally released in the novelty “Big Cohuna Vision” process — a half-baked hybrid of 3D projection and quadrophonic sound — this film’s sensory gimmicks were less about dazzling spectacle and more about amplifying tedium. In a perverse twist of marketing genius, the rattling of the bus engine was pumped into all four corners of the cinema. The audience felt every lurch of the suspension, every cough of the driver, every monotonous fly buzz reverberating in their skulls.

The result was an endurance test. No air conditioning in the cinema mirrored the no air conditioning on-screen. The padded vinyl seats of the theatre grew sticky and unbearable, as though you too were wedged into that coach, trapped between a pensioner yammering about his fishing trip and a chain-smoker recounting his glory days at the MCG.

Critics at the time were divided. Some derided it as “a practical joke passed off as cinema,” while others (mostly late-night horror hosts and university cinephiles) lauded it as “the purest expression of existential terror ever committed to film.”

Looking back, it’s clear Night Bus to Cohuna was less horror movie and more avant-garde social experiment. The central conceit — that boredom itself is the ultimate human fear — plays out with devastating accuracy. Before mobile phones, before streaming, before handheld distractions, the very idea of an endless road trip with nothing to do was enough to drive an audience mad.

The so-called monsters of the film — tedious small talk, endless highway monotony, the suffocating stillness of the outback night — are utterly ordinary, yet they linger longer than any zombie or vampire. Night Bus to Cohuna understood that life’s greatest terror is not being stalked by a killer, but being stuck next to a stranger telling you, in excruciating detail, how to descale a fishing rod… for hours.

In the final analysis, this is a film that weaponises stillness, silence, and the absence of escape. And in doing so, it foreshadowed decades of horror that grappled with the banality of existence.

Night Bus to Cohuna may never have the gorehound reputation of Patrick or The Cars That Ate Paris, but its gimmicky Big Cohuna Vision release locked it into cult infamy. To this day, there are whispers of audience members who never made it to the end of the screening — not because they ran out screaming, but because they simply… fell asleep.

And maybe that’s the truest terror of all....