Not Quite Hollywood

Subtitled ‘the wild, untold story of Ozsploitation’, this cheerfully vulgar documentary investigates the seedy underbelly of the ’70s Australian film boom. Uninterested in telling stories, as Barry Humphries describes it, about ‘nice girls in white dresses vanishing into rocks’, an incestuous, mostly male gang of rebel filmmakers decided to present their ideas of what Australian culture should be: loud, crass, bloody and occasionally brilliant.

Director Mark Hartley’s enthusiasm for his subject infuses every frame, as his cannily selected talking heads – from Aussie legend Humphries to fawning fanboys like Quentin Tarantino – are repeatedly interrupted by another luridly animated, smash-edited round of gratuitous gore ’n’ boobs. But he gives the genuine genre classics space to shine: films like ‘Long Weekend’, ‘Roadgames’ and of course ‘Mad Max’ are treated with reverence.

The end product, while shallow and sometimes discomfitingly furtive, offers an enlightening, pleasurable peek into one of cinema’s more enticing dark corners.