Not Quite Hollywood

This is a ripper documentary about ‘Ozploitation’. Sounds like a retrospective label to me, as I don’t think it was ever used at the time, although perhaps the Americans called it that. I was worried that Quentin Tarantino was going to be a bit of a disappointment but his love for the material seemed genuine.

The Barry McKenzie films and Alvin Purple get a look in too, even though they’re not really what I’d call exploitation, so it’s more like Australian cinema history 1970-1988 minus the classy period pieces. There are a lot of splatter films I’d never heard of, most of which I can happily live without. Although I am looking forward to chasing up Road Games, a psycho-killer road movie with Jamie Lee Curtis, and Long Weekend, in which a bickering couple on holiday are attacked by everything from sharks to sea eagles to a surprisingly aggro possum.

Then there’s the stuntman Grant Page, who drove a motorbike off a cliff in Stone, was called insane by Denis Hopper on the set of Mad Dog Morgan, and appeared in his own feature:

Philip Adams and Bob Ellis both make complete fools of themselves.