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.
