Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!

Dir: Mark Hartley

2008

*****

Of all of cinema's different styles, I think it is fair to say that exploitation has the most sub-genres. Most people have heard of Sexploitation and Blaxploitation and connoisseurs of the b-movie will know their Nazisploitation from their Nunsploitation and will enjoy the odd Chambara and the occasional Giallo but not that many people outside of Australia are (or at least weren't) aware of Ozploitation. Ozploitation was all of the above but were made in Australia and are about as Australian as you can get. Mad Max is probably the most famous one but many people won't know of the association. Mark Hartley grew up in the 70's and 80's and was fanatical about the b-movies his country was then producing but when he tried to look into the history of Australian film many years later, he found a huge gap were these films should have been. The film establishment of Oz weren't proud of these film and they were overlooked and dismissed as worthless, talentless pieces of smutty garbage. To be fair, some of the films are indeed smutty but none of them are worthless, talentless or garbage. Hartley then began what would be five long years of meticulous research into the sub-genre and wrote the screenplay for a feature length documentary. Absolutely no one was interested, so as a last-ditch attempt on getting it made (and because he had heard that he was a fan after he had dedicated Kill Bill to Brian Trenchard-Smith - one of the more prolific directors of the genre) he sent 100 pages of the script to Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino replied the next day and with his help he finally got the film made five years later, after more research and around 250 hours’ worth of interviews from pretty much everyone involved in the genre that was still alive, including Tarantino, Brian Trenchard-Smith, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dennis Hopper, George Lazenby, George Miller, Barry Humphries, Stacy Keach and John Seale. Hartley's brilliant and rather comprehensive documentary acknowledges the great mainstream films that Australia was producing but also acts as a historically accurate document and rather loving tribute. He breaks the film into four chapters, starting with the Australian new-wave and then concentrating in the three sub-genres of exploitation that Ozploitation excelled at; the action film, the horror and the sex romp. The most important element to get right in this kind of documentary is the editing. Just interweaving interview with film footage isn't enough, the film needs a fluidity in its structure and the structure needs to follow a certain route, whether it be chronological or by theme or person etc and Hartley manages it brilliantly. He really does explain the evolution of what was a fast growing industry and he explores much of what was happening behind the screen rather than just churn out old footage and talk about it. He talks about the safety of the pictures too and asks direct questions of the directors of films that crew members were seriously hurt making and discusses the tragic deaths of other crew members that changed the rules and regulations of how films were made globally. It's as exciting as it is informative and it opened my eyes to many great films that I would have otherwise overlooked, it's absolutely brilliant.