Not Quite Hollywood (Mark Hartley, 2008)
Mark Hartley’s documentary on “Ozploitation” – Australian exploitation movies of the 70s and early 80s – should find an enthusiastic audience. It is great fun, largely because it reproduces all the best moments form a body of work that is probably more a lot more enjoyable to reminisce about, and see highlights from, than it is to actually sit through in its entirety. After briefly setting the historical context, it starts with what I think are the best remembered sub-genre, the “ocker” and sex comedies from the 1970s (Stork, Alvin Purple, the Barry McKenzie films, and so on), and then works through horror films and action films (the films’ structure gives the impression that the filmmakers had an eye on being able to break the film up into separate episodes of a TV show). So we get basically all the sauciest and funniest moments from the sex comedies, followed by the most outrageous scenes from the horrors, and the best stunts from the action films. As a highlights package, it’s fabulous, and Hartley intersperses interviews with many key participants (plus Quentin Tarantino representing the fan’s perspective as only he can).
The clips and behind the scenes anecdotes are good enough to make it essential viewing simply as entertainment, and as a straightforward catalogue of the main works it’s also valuable. (I was pretty familiar with the basic landscape of the ocker comedies, but I had no idea that the body of low budget horror was so large). Those hankering for a really serious documentary, rather than a simple tribute / celebration / highlight reel, might be left a little disappointed, though: there isn’t much attempt to dig into any kind of serious analysis. For example, Hartley doesn’t really seem interested in the similarities between the use of sex in the ocker comedies and Australian art cinema of the time: the two movements are portrayed as parallel but separate, whereas it seems to me the boundaries between the two were fairly fluid. And because the film is so laudatory, it’s not very good as a critical overview of films that, on the whole, generally weren’t actually very good. It’s mainly left to Bob Ellis to be the voice of scepticism, and his super-dry putdowns are amongst the film’s funniest moments.
It’s also interesting just for the portrait of producer Tony Ginnane, who was surely the inspiration for Tony Martin’s Warren Perso:
Seen at the Melbourne International Film Festival.