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| Mark Hartley and I introduce the BIFF premiere screening of NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD, August 2008 |
2008 was the year I
programmed the “Ozploitation” Retrospective at the Brisbane
International Film Festival, to coincide with the release of Mark
Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood. Little did we know we’d end up
working together on Machete Maidens Unleashed! the following year. My
catalogue notes and mini-reviews appeared in the BIFF 2008 program.
OZPLOITATION!
Knockers, Shockers and the Coming (And Coming Again) Of The R
Certificate
The Australian film
industry in the Seventies was like Janus, the two headed Hell Hound
emerging out of the barren, Menzies-stained cultural wastleland. One
shiny, perfectly manicured head was called Art - everyone said they
loved Art, forever patting his head and saying "What a good boy.
Have another bowl of Chabilis." The second head was called
Artless, who smelt like damp carpet and was forever licking his balls
in public. Yet despite his appalling lack of social grace, you can't
help but fall in love with Artless. It just takes a while to get his
unique fragrance out of the cushions.
Quentin Tarantino
loves Artless too. During his 2003 publicity tour for Kill Bill, his
love letter to Seventies kung fu movies, Quentin raved to blank-faced
Australian journalists about his favourite Aussie filmmaker Brian
Trenchard-Smith. Blank. The director of The Man From Hong Kong? Still
blank. "But he's made a lot of films..."
In Not Quite
Hollywood, Tarantino is finally given the floor to enthuse at length
on what he coins "Ozploitation", a cathartic squall of
cinematic excesses reflecting the drive-in explosion in America from
a few years before. For a good decade following the early Seventies
our screens saw sex and blood, druggery and thuggery, kung fu kicks,
music, more sex and vicarious thrills nestling uncomfortably next to
pinafores and period prattling. For every Hanging Rock there was a
Hanging Cock, and during that brief, seemingly forgotten and arguably
Golden Age we were a miniature colonial outpost version of B-king
Roger Corman's genre sausage factory New World, until the demise of
the drive ins and rise of home video changed the B film market
worldwide.
And good riddance,
some would say. For those fascist aesthetes who pass judgement on a
film's cultural importance with bourgeois buzzwords like
"significant" and "profound", Ozploitation is the
steady drip that won't go away. Gleefully un-PC and revelling in
their own shock tactics and gratuitous, cartoonish nudity and
violence, the most despised of all genres - sex, horror, action,
biker and kung fu movies - were also among the top-grossing
Australian films of the decade. One could argue sex films helped
bankroll a bonafide film industry: Tim Burstall's success of
fourwalling his first commercial feature Stork in 1971 led Roadshow
to bankroll Burstall's Hexagon Productions and Alvin Purple (1971),
the first homegrown sex comedy under the new R certificate, and the
first legitimate hit for the emerging "New Australian Cinema".
It's like the Mafia underwriting cheques for the Kennedy campaigns,
but with less gunfire. And yet the debt to Alvin Purple is hardly
mentioned, and never in polite company. In a country which canonizes
its pioneers, cinema strangely pays little heed to its own
trailblazers.
Only a few years
before, it was considered a joke to call yourself an Australian
filmmaker. The Lucky Ones could make a fortune in advertising rather
than slave in our version of Poverty Row making formulaic product for
television's unblinking Third Eye. Suddenly it seemed most of us woke
up from our sanitized Anglophile daydream: to the naked ear there was
an instant audience more than willing to pay to hear Sailor Talk with
an "Orstraylian" accent. Then there was (is?) our
primordial fixation on SMUT. Senator Don Chipp's aggressive campaign
to introduce the R Certificate coincided with the tide of cultural
and sexual liberation washing over the dry continent, and within a
year the brittle, oppressive wowserism of the Menzies-era thought
police was becoming a glaring anachronism. Which is not to say it
atrophied and blew away. Richard Franklin's filmmaking career was
almost crushed by a well-orchestrated campaign by the Festival of
Light objecting to his R-rated yet thoroughly innocuous comedy The
True Story Of Eskimo Nell (1975), and he resorted to a nom-de-plume
for his second, more salacious offering Fantasm (1976). Franklin's
producer Anthony Ginnane was to become a pariah himself amongst the
cultural elite, whose oddly parochial protectionist attitudes towards
importing actors or exporting Australian films overseas were in stark
contrast with Ginnane's foaming-at-the-mouth internationalist
approach. To this day, Ginnane's ability to second-guess audience
trends and to sell his "despicable" genre films to the
world makes him one of the country's most victorious Sleazy Riders.
Predictably, too
much of a good thing left Aussie audiences bloated and jaded, and
looking for new thrills. Between Alvin and its 1974 sequel Alvin
Rides Again, the public's fascination for seeing sex on screen faded,
only to be replaced by action and horror. Exit Alvin and Petersen;
enter Stone, Mad Max, and a slew of cheap and nasties inspired by the
success of cheap, nasty horror hits from overseas. Genre movies
followed the Corman model, reflecting the simple carnal desires of
their drive-in demographic: there were car films (High Rolling, FJ
Holden, Oz) and biker films (Stone, Cozy Cool, Mad Max), all with
blaring Oz Rock soundtracks. Some films even straddled the arbitrary
divide between art and exploitation (the brilliant Hitchcock-inspired
Long Weekend, for example) and, not surprisingly, do it with style
and chutzpah. A few filmmakers like Burstall and Franklin were able
to able to scale the walls out of the Exploitation Ghetto, but only
just. On the other side of the wall, there existed master showmen
with no pretenses towards making "art" - John D. Lamond,
Australia's own Russ Meyer, had earlier devised the ad campaigns for
Roadshow's controversial hits like A Clockwork Orange and Emmanuelle,
then used his canny ballyhoo skills for his own nefarious ends:
Felicity, Australia After Dark, The ABC Of Love And Sex Australia
Style...
And yet, even at
their most repellent and exploitative, Australian B-films are
well-crafted, belying their pitifully low budgets, and have an
exceedingly liberal dose of self-awareness that's irresistible.
Remember Janus the two headed Wonder Dog? It's still the same
creature; the two heads are merely that arbitrary divide between Art
and Artless, and ultimately are both needed for the creature to
exist. Please keep this in mind when the Artless part is dry humping
your leg and his breath smells like the death of fun itself.
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| Daniel Palisa, myself, Brian Trenchard-Smith and Antony Ginnane outside their TURKEY SHOOT screening |
ALVIN PURPLE (1971)
A knowing satire on the Swinging Seventies and the Permissive
Society, Alvin Purple uses the classic English sex comedy model of a
hapless, clumsy innocent who becomes an inadvertent sex symbol,
gigolo and porn star! Despite its "sex film" tag it was a
smash and has an enduring popularity due to its good-natured humour
and Burstall's quirky direction, Brian Cadd's hit film score, and an
assured supporting cast loaded with familiar TV and film faces. Then
there's the endearing Alvin himself, Graeme Blundell, whose portrayal
as the Vegemite-smeared Candide is as iconic as the brown stuff
itself. Friday 1st August 2008 9:10pm, The Regent 1
PATRICK (1977)
Australia's response to the ESP horrors of Carrie and The Fury has a
glass-eyed patient, shocked into a coma by the death of his mother,
unleashing a Pandora's Box of destruction from his hospital bed. A
sympathetic nurse and Patrick's doctor (Sir Robert Helpmann) uncover
Patrick's traumatic past, and suspect there's an endless well of evil
behind the vacant stare. Australian horror's first international
breakthrough is a suprisingly effective and highly stylized exercise
in tension, due to to Richard Franklin's sure hand and a layered
script by Everett de Roche. Saturday 2nd August 2008 8:30pm, The
Regent 1
THE MAN FROM HONG
KONG (1975) The unlikely pairing of Village Roadshow and martial arts
studio Golden Harvest produced Australia's only true blue kung fu
flick. Imported kung fu superstar "Jimmy" Wang Yu plays a
Hong Kong cop out to bust Bondian supervillain (and former James
Bond) George Lazenby in a flurry of flying fists and tough guy
theatrics. From the film's opening chopathon atop Ayers Rock to its
window-shattering finale, expatriate action specialist Brian
Trenchard-Smith keeps tongue firmly in cheek whilst wringing
remarkably straight-faced performances from Rebecca Gilling, Frank
Thring, a young Sammo Hung and Mad Max's Roger Ward and Hugh
Keays-Byrne. Sunday 3rd August 2008 9:00pm, The Regent 1
TURKEY SHOOT (1982)
Purist, trashy, joyously exploitative drive-in fodder set in a
"futuristic" jungle prison where detainees slated for
brainwashing are subjected to endless all-girl showers and torture
sequences, then forced to participate in a deadly man-hunt in the
North Queensland jungle. Trenchard-Smith's hyper-ludicrous hybrid of
The Big Doll House, 1984 and The Most Dangerous Game was blasted by
critics as the lowpoint of Australian cinema to date. Which is true,
and proudly so; only now can its bleak, jet-black humour, prolific
gore and imaginative genre-splicing place this disreputable chancre
of a film as a true classic of Australian B cinema. Sunday 3rd August
2008 11:10pm, The Regent 1
STONE (1975)
One-shot auteur Sandy Harbutt wrote, directed and starred in Aussie
bikerdom's uncompromising counter culture classic. An idealistic
young cop dons the denims of biker gang the Gravediggers to uncover a
serial killer in their midst; as Stone descends deeper into their
culture he finds, between the knife fights, skinny-dipping and
psychedelics, the meaning of the term Honour Among Thieves. Harbutt's
sympathies clearly lie with the outlaws, a stance at odds with the
biker genre's usual conservatism and faux morality. Stripped of Mad
Max's futurist trappings, Stone thus stands alone as a compelling,
not to mention career-killing mix of kitsch and conviction. Wednesday
6th August 2008 9:30pm, The Regent 1
ADVENTURES OF BARRY
McKENZIE (1972) Bruce Beresford's technically rough, hilarious
bad-taste ode to the wide-eyed and obnoxious Fosters-soaked Aussie
abroad rips Barry Humphries' character from the pages of Private Eye
and brings him to life in all his technicolour triumph, as he tears a
swathe through English politeness along with his pre-Dame Auntie Edna
(Humphries again, in one of three roles). As Bazza, Barry Crocker -
yes, THE Barry Crocker - has the big chin, the potty mouth and
glaring anachronistic "Strine" lingo, and the blissful lack
of self-awareness that nail the script's satiric swipes at all and
sundry. With cameos from Spike Milligan, Peter Cook, and various
other "pommie bastards". Thursday 7th August 2008 9:30pm,
The Regent 1
LONG WEEKEND (1978)
Nature turns nasty in an underrated and, until recently, forgotten
masterpiece of terror. Everett de Roche's remarkable two-character
script pits a self-absorbed and relentlessly bickering city couple on
a relationship-repairing beach retreat against an increasingly
hostile, almost supernatural environment: birds swoop, the usually
docile kangaroos slash and claw, and the reappearance of a dugong
shot by Hardgreaves as target practice is harbinger of a fate which,
to de Roche's credit, is never explained. Dark, suspenseful,
ambiguous, and utterly enthralling, and hardly suprisingly, is due
for a remake. Friday 8th August 2008 10:50pm, The Regent 1
OZPLOITATION SEMINAR
In conjunction with our retrospective focus, this panel will explore
the history of Australian genre cinema and the industrial conditions
which led to cult classics like Alvin Purple, Patrick and Turkey
Shoot making it to the big screen. Guests: Andrew Leavold, Alan
Finney (actor/producer, Alvin Purple), Mark Hartley (director, Not
Quite Hollywood), Antony Ginnane (producer, Patrick & Turkey
Shoot), Brian Trenchard-Smith (director, The Man From Hong Kong & Turkey Shoot), and academic Catherine
Lumby. Saturday 2nd August 2008, 12pm GoMA Cinema A. Youtube
highlights are here
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