Good Ideas: Ozsploitation

I've gotten really interested, lately, in vintage foreign action movie genres, namely the Nikkatsu yakuza thrillers of the 1960's, and the Roger Corman-produced, Pam Grier-starring quazi-Blaxploitation women-in-prison action movies from the 1970's, movies like The Big Doll House and Black Mama, White Mama (they count as foreign because they were shot in the Philippines). I have to admit I'm even curious about those awful Golan & Globus action movies that were shot in Israel or Apartheid-era South Africa in the late 1980's. Maybe this was a phase I should have gone through when I was younger, but right now I'm rethinking my old attitudes about "guy" movies, movies that are gritty and cheep and know it.

I can now add another sub-genre to that list, thanks to today's episode of The Business on KCRW (I listen to the podcast version every week). Ozsploitation is the subject of a documentary called Not Quite Hollywood, which documents the rash of sleezy, ultraviolent and bra-ripping early days of 1970's Australian filmmaking. According to the director, Australia had developed a very strong film industry in the 1940's and 1950's, but the foreign powers bought up all the cinemas in the 1960's and pushed the homegrown industry out. The country's return to domestic film output co-incided with the dismantling of censorship laws, and as a result, the outback cinema became one of blood and boobs, and more than a handful of near-death car stunts. Among the best known of the genre were Mad Max and The Cars That Ate Paris, but there were dozens of other films that were far dirtier, far more explicitly violent and sexual, far more shocking. The genre also gave start to a lot of careers, including Barry Humphries/Dame Edna Everage, who you'll remember from another blog entry.

I had no idea there was a piece of history like this lurking in the shadows, but it does fit with what information I did already have about Aussie films. If I had to name any Austrailian movie older than Mad Max, I couldn't get much farther than The Story of the Kelly Gang. and that's only because it's been acknowleged as the first feature film ever made that wasn't a boxing documentary. It's really qite a sad story, that of Australia's film industry, that it produced the worlds feature film (in the tender year of 1906) and had a thriving industry that was so destroyed by America in about fifteen years time that these films are the output of an industry that was starting over from scratch.

That's not to diminish the value of the movies that are profiled in Not Quite Hollywood. They look fun and exciting. Given the context in which they were made, I feel like now is the best time for me to see them. The really ironic thing is that the only other movies being made in Australia at the time were languid hits and misses like Walkabout (hit) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (not a hit).

Somehow I bet Night of Fear or Alvin Purple Rides Again are a lot more watchable that the beautifully shot but not very rewarding Careful, He Might Hear You, which I just sent back to Netflix yesterday.)We'll see how I feel once I've seen a few Ozsploitation movies all the way through, but first, Seijin Suzuki's Youth of the Beast.