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AUSTRALIAN CINEMA / DVD
OZPLOITATION VOL. 1 (1973-1982)
Umbrella DVD (region 4)
credits: various

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The Revivalist Appreciation of Australian Exploitation Cinema

The recent Australian cinema success of the acclaimed documentary Not Quite Hollywood shed light on a seldom examined facet of Aussie filmmaking – exploitation.  In the 1970s, just as feature film production became increasingly viable after being virtually non-existent for twenty years, a number of prominent filmmakers began to develop an Australian cinema that would eventually see the successes of such films as Picnic at Hanging Rock and Sunday Too Far Away, birthing what international film critics termed the “Australian New Wave”.  But, just as viable at home – though rarely exported – was a burgeoning exploitation film industry, one that began by deliberately breaking social taboos in the quest to find a distinctly Australian cinematic identity.

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When Aussies First Examined their own Sexual Socialization

1970 saw the release of one of the first such Aussie exploitation films, The Naked Bunyip, produced by John Murray, who took to driving the film from city to city himself with a projector in tow to ensure that ordinary Aussies could finally see some local product to compete the bulk of material imported from the USA. 

Starring Graeme Blundell (who would later find fame as the eponymous Alvin Purple) and Barry Humphries, The Naked Bunyip was a mock sociological documentary examining Australian attitudes towards sex.  With some nudity and much sexual frankness the film soon ran into trouble with the censors of the day, who insisted that cuts be made – which the filmmakers agreed to, cleverly animating over the offending images and bleeping out the offensive sounds (talk of casual and group sex).Balancing an insightful look at Aussie sexual mores with a simultaneous parody of the prudery of Australian society, The Naked Bunyip is a gleeful and amusing romp through the Australia of the early 1970s. 

Always engaging, it is wittily scripted and performed although perhaps suffers from a loose structure and leisurely pace.  Its willingness to confront sexual matters with both disarming candidness and erotic yearning would prove influential, its popular success opening the floodgates for a wave of sex comedies that included Fantasm, Fantasm Comes Again, Felicity and The True Story of Eskimo Nell.  Seen today it is perhaps dated but still captures a larrikin-like crudity that would also prove infectious throughout the remainder of the decade, foreshadowing the caricaturish view of Australian masculinity in the popular hit The Adventures of Barry McKenzie.

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Satire and the Beginnings of the Australian "Cultural Cringe"

Starring Barry Crocker as the titular hero, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie was adapted in 1972 from the comic strip by Barry Humphries and directed by Bruce Beresford.

Audiences went to the film in droves and found it uproariously funny, especially those scenes which ridiculed Englishmen (or “poms” as the Aussie colloquialism had it).  Mainstream critics turned against the film however, lamenting what they saw as a crude and coarse vulgarity in its depiction of Australian behaviour, language and culture.  Indeed, these critics feared that the film was an embarrassment to Australia’s proper cultural heritage and worried about what the British in particular may think of Australians once the film was to be shown there, not least since the film mocked any and all at every opportunity.

It is difficult to consider The Adventures of Barry McKenzie as anything but a live action comic strip writ large on the screen.  The humour is often caricatured and crass and in its depiction of Aussie larrikinism has a populist crudity that celebrates the most vulgar and unflattering of Australian stereotypes.  That said it is joyous in its celebration of what a decade later would be termed a “politically incorrect” Australiana and endures as not only a great Australian exploitation film but a genuine rarity in bringing the exploitation mindset to a medium thought suited only to high culture.  It is the populism of this film that endures, its status as a landmark Australian film confirmed by its influence on the development of what would come to be known as the “ocker”school, through even to being just the type of image that Paul Hogan sought to redress and comment upon when he made Crocodile Dundee and that Yahoo Serious would draw upon for Young Einstein and Reckless Kelly over a decade later.

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Australian Gothic and the Rural Exploitation Grunge Aesthetic

While The Adventures of Barry McKenzie was winning audiences nationwide, a different, grungy, low-key type of exploitation was being pioneered by director Terry Bourke in the films Night of Fear and Inn of the Damned.

It was here that Australian horror was born: but not simple shock – Bourke provided a palpable sexual undercurrent that led to the censors of the day calling his work indecent and obscene.  The sex comedies that were proliferating in the wake of The Naked Bunyip were usually jovial affairs which stressed the positive qualities of human sexuality.  Not so the films of Terry Bourke, which were rooted in morbid pathology and brought to the Australian outback a quality of Gothic decadence and sheer malicious malevolence.

Bourke’s films are often dismissed as “idiotic” by critics and indeed as a director he is more comfortable with horrific action than with character nuance.  However, they represent the beginning of an Australian movement towards the Grand Guignol, the theatre of blood, gore, psychopathology and grisly effects.  They are more visceral in that regard than any preceding films and in that are perhaps truer to the exploitation tradition which, after all, delighted in moral ambivalence and an assault on the senses.  That said, they remain perhaps best thought of as curios, although Inn of the Damned in particular has a grim nastiness that would endear it to a burgeoning Australian cult audience for horror, Bourke following it up with such films as Lady Stay Dead and never connecting with either the critics so enamoured of the Aussie arthouse movie or the mainstream fondness for crude humour in the ocker series.

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Tax Incentives and the Beginnings of Internationalism

By 1980, the federal government was offering lucrative tax incentives to spearhead the growth of Australian film.  Enterprising producer Tony Ginnane responded to this by single-handedly introducing internationalism into the Australian exploitation scene.  This he did by arranging packages wherein a film would be made in Australia utilizing a local crew so as to qualify for the tax breaks but filled with international actors and directors.

Such groups as Actors Equity would repeatedly run in with Ginnane through the decade, debating whether the presence of such international personnel truly qualified the films as Australian.  This debate would commence with a number of films Ginnane did with Britisher David Hemmings, including Harlequin for which Ginnane brought in such un-Aussie co-stars as Robert Powell and Broderick Crawford to supplement the local actors.

Harlequin was a curio, an Australian re-telling of the Russian legend of Rasputin the mad monk and directed by Simon Wincer who by the end of the decade would commence a career in Hollywood. With Crawford in a lead role, much of Harlequin seems Americanized and although shot in Perth, few Australian critics could find anything distinctively Aussie about the picture.  Although saturated with political overtones, the bizarre mysticism and pseudo-spiritual menace of the film makes it well and truly in exploitation territory: indeed Hemmings would stay in Australia to direct Powell in The Survivor for Ginnane.  In that, Harlequin is best thought of as an attempt to internationalize Australian exploitation and what it loses in Aussie distinctiveness it gains in peculiar mood and texture, making it one of the least appreciated of Australian films as the nation entered the 1980s.

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Importing American Actors for Australian Thrillers

Seizing upon the internationalism of Ginnane’s successful enterprises was director Richard Franklin.  Franklin had previously contributed one of the post Naked Bunyip sex comedies – The True Story of Eskimo Nell – but had always been a fan of Alfred Hitchcock, helming the cult thriller Patrick to much cult success. 

Thus, Franklin sought to re-visit the outback Gothic Guignol of Terry Bourke with his work on Roadgames for which he imported two American actors, Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis (then fresh from the hit Halloween and an established genre icon).  Making good use of the Australian outback for a tale of a serial killer targeting female hitchhikers, Roadgames brought a sense of intellectual and psychological gamesmanship to the exploitation film, exploring the gradual link between the killer and a truck driver fascinated by his exploits and trying to understand what would make the killer do what he does.

Although the chance of an American truck driver happening to pick up an American hitchhiker in the middle of the Australian outback was too unlikely a coincidence for many critics to overlook, Roadgames was nevertheless a highly praised thriller and a rare Aussie serial killer film.  With his work here, Franklin brought to the exploitation film a jigsaw puzzle like structure and stressed intellect and wit as key means of survival in the harsh Australian bush.  As a student of Hitchcock, Franklin was also able to bring a polished visual style to the disreputable subject matter and Roadgames slowly emerged a workable bridge between exploitation and the mainstream, successful enough to allow Franklin to also develop a career in Hollywood where he subsequently went to direct Psycho 2, the sequel to Hitchcock’s most renowned film.

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Embracing the Ambiguities of International Exploitation

Franklin was a bridging figure where Bourke could not be.  But several other Aussie exploitation filmmakers turned away from the mainstream and whole-heartedly embraced the sensationalist moral ambiguity of classic American exploitation as pioneered by such figures as Roger Corman.  Foremost amongst these low-grade Aussie exploitation directors was Brian Trenchard-Smith who in 1982 contributed perhaps the most outrageous and violently nihilistic exploitation movie ever made in Australia, Turkey Shoot. 

Importing Americans Olivia Hussey and Steve Railsback, Trenchard-Smith threw himself into the staging of reprehensible and explicit sex and violence.  Beheadings, mutilations, rape and riot featured prominently in Turkey Shoot, a film which would develop a cult reputation outside of Australia. Nightmarish and futuristic, Turkey Shoot was at $3.2 million one of the most lavishly budgeted exploitation films ever shot in Australia.  Described and dismissed as a splatter fantasy it updated one of the greatest narratives in exploitation cinema – The Most Dangerous Game – and alienated critics with its emphasis on crude sexual innuendo, sexualized violence and a relentlessly jokey Orwellian depiction of a future class society.   On his part, Trenchard-Smith admitted that “the name of the game is blood and guts” and delivered a final film so grotesque and outrageously over the top that it approached a kind of Guignol comedy, though critics were more inclined to turn away in disgust than laugh at the extreme nature of the film.  Still, it is perhaps Turkey Shoot that most clearly fulfils the tradition begun a decade earlier by Terry Bourke and the film stands as a genuine landmark in Aussie exploitation.

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In Conclusion: Ozploitation and DVD for Collectors

The seven films (on six DVDs) in this Box Set offer a cross-section of a decade in Australian film wherein the arthouse thrived and exploitation prospered alongside it – though rarely were they associated as part of the same industry.  Although it is the arthouse product that is held onto as the best in Aussie film, the exploitation industry was both vital and prolific during the formation of Australian cinema during the so-called “New Wave”.  Indeed, current Aussie cinema owes to the inventiveness of its disreputable works as much as it does its most esteemed: and it is in viewing the films in this collection (and its second volume) that the true diversity and low budget ingenuity of Australian cinema can fully be appreciated, admired and collected.

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DVD PURCHASE INFORMATION:
Oz-Ploitation Boxset Vol 1

AUSTRALIAN CINEMA / DVD