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By EdwardHavens
July 30th, 2009
If "Alvin Purple" gets you more excited than "Alvin and the Chipmunks"... if the thought of a new Brian Trenchard-Smith movie is more exhilarating than a new Bryan Singer movie... if you prefer Max Rockatansky to Max Fischer, then Mark Hartley's "Not Quite Hollywood" is the film for you.
While a good cinephile might be well-versed in American exploitation movies of the 1960s and 1970s, and fairly knowledgeable in the early Australian works of such filmmakers as Gillian Anderson, Bruce Beresford and Peter Weir. There’s a good chance some of us even had the chance to see “Roadgames” or “Harlequin” in our local grindhouses. However, it’s unlikely very few of us outside of Quentin Tarantino (who is seen extensively heard from here) would be familiar with the likes of “Caddie,” Hoodwink” or “Centrespread,” just three of the more than seventy-five popular and lesser-known Ozploitation films covered by Hartley, and by the time you’re done 103 minutes later, you too will be an expert in Australian cinema, and seen more blood, guts, car crashes, explosions, naked boys, naked girls, projectile vomiting and cross-dressers than you would have sneaking in to every theatre at your local multiplex this or any other week.
After a raucous opening credit sequence (appropriately set to a song not by a huge Aussie band like AC/DC but the lesser known Rose Tattoo), Hartley jumps right into the later history of the Australian film industry, which in the late 1960s, did not exist save the occasional production from visiting filmmakers like Michael Powell. One clip from the time even points out the local industry ranked besides Ecuador and Iceland amongst the countries with the smallest film industries. It wasn’t until the early 1970s, when Australian elected two prime ministers, John Gorton (1968-1971) and Gough Whitlam (1972-1975), who were deeply committed to creating a local film culture. And like the American film industry taking off in a new direction with the MPAA’s creation of a rating system, the Australian industry took off in 1971 when Don Chipp, the Minister of Customs and Excise, helped to create an Australian “R” rating (persons 2 to 18 years not admitted).
Hartley breaks the film down into three major sections, based on the basic requirements of most exploitation films: sex (Ockers, Knockers, Pubes & Tubes!), horror (Comatose Killers and Outback Chillers!) and action (High Octane Disasters and Kung-Fu Masters!). Not too surprisingly, most of the documentary is spent on the latter segment, which is what the films of the era were best known for around the world, with the best-known film of the period, “Mad Max,” getting the most individual screen time.
Hartley was able to get a series of interviews with famous Aussie filmmakers and technicians (Bruce Beresford, Russell Boyd, Barry Humphries, George Miller and John Seale) and the American actors (Jamie Lee Curtis, Dennis Hopper, Stacy Keach and Steve Railsback) who worked on these genre films. But what is especially refreshing is that he was able to get so many people to be less-than-flattering, and even occasionally downright nasty, about some of their work. Wouldn’t it be nice to see and hear some American filmmakers admit their own work wasn’t as good as it could be?
Some might complain very little time is spent on the next wave of Australian genre filmmakers like Greg McLean and James Wan, but that’s not what this is concerned about. (Nor will you hear anyone but myself complain about the complete absence of Yahoo Serious.) What Hartley and his friends want to do is remind us of what was a rough and exciting, no-holds-barred cinema that has sadly been lost to time. For us film geeks, “Not Quite Hollywood” is a keeper. Sometime to show our children and grandchildren what these movies were liked before worldwide entertainment corporate consolidation and overall cinematic homogeny.
My rating: A