THE HORSEMAN is an Australian revenge picture out on DVD in the U.S. today. At the start this guy’s daughter has already died of a heroin overdose just after filming a porno. It’s a low budget deal shot in a boxing gym – she’s not a Vivid girl or nothing. He doesn’t really know what happened but he blames the porn people for her death, so he’s tracking down everybody involved, burning them alive, etc. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Australian cinema’
The Horseman
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010Wake in Fright (aka Outback)
Saturday, May 1st, 2010
WAKE IN FRIGHT is a fever dream of a movie from Australia circa 1971 and director Ted Kotcheff (FIRST BLOOD). It stars Bond… Gary Bond as a teacher leaving for Christmas break from a school he’s stuck teaching at out in the middle of nowhere in the outback. He hates it and is desperate to make it back to Sydney and see his surfer girlfriend. But it’s a long trip and while staying the night in a town called “The Yabba” he goes out for a drink. And it turns out to be a long fucking night. (more…)
Popcorn vs. Cut
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
In further Halloween leftovers I have a double feature of “cursed movie” movies.
After seeing THE SUBSTITUTE and PORKY’S 2: PORKY IS NOT IN THIS ONE THOUGH I wanted to catch up with all the other movies Alan Ormsby had anything to do with, and POPCORN seemed like a good choice for Halloween. It’s about some film students who put on a big vintage horror marathon complete with William Castle style gimmicks. It happens at a big old style movie house and the patrons come in costume and ready to be obnoxious.
But the most obnoxious is a mystery maniac who’s terrorizing the place, possibly for reasons related to a “film cult” whose unfinished last film POSSESSOR these students happened to find a print of. Apparently this cult leader/auteur named Gates showed the movie before burning down a theater… and they never found the body. Not sure if that is relevant but thought I’d mention it just in case, I don’t know. Might be an unnecessary detail. (more…)
The Howling III: The Marsupials
Saturday, July 11th, 2009
I always liked THE HOWLING but since the sequels are made by different people and have a reputation for poor quality I never thought to watch them. Then I watched NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD, that documentary about Australian exploitation movies, and saw the clips from THE HOWLING III: THE MARSUPIALS by Australian director Phillipe Mora. It looked like a crazy fever dream full of low-budget-but-really-cool werewolf transformations, some of them looking straight-up cartoonish. Plus they showed how the werewolves have pouches in this one, and gave away the most memorable scene – I’ll get to that later. I figured just from what I saw there was no way this wasn’t worth watching. And I figured right. (more…)
Not Quite Hollywood + Hurricane Smith
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD is a pretty good documentary with a really good subject: the history of exploitation movies in Australia. Of course, this is a talking heads and film clips movie, that’s about the only way they could do it. And it tries to cover a broad range of movies over many years, so it doesn’t get real deep into anything. It’s more like a real good TV special than a great movie. It’s a primer, an overview, a sampler to get you started. It gives you a taste of a whole bunch of strange movies you might not have heard of before, points you in some interesting directions, tells you a few good stories. And for that sort of thing it’s very good. (more…)
Death Cheaters and Stunt Rock
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
Looking into the early works of Brian Trenchard-Smith I found a genre I never knew existed: stuntsploitation. Here are two movies about the world of stuntmen, with flimsy plots (if any) to string together a bunch of cool stunt sequences.
First and best is a goofy comedy called DEATH CHEATERS. The title daredevils are played by the mustached John Hargreaves and the bearded Grant Page. Page seems kind of like the sidekick here, but in reality he was and is one of Australia’s top stuntmen. He was the movie’s stunt coordinator and had already done the same for Trenchard-Smith’s THE MAN FROM HONG KONG. He even did the hang gliding for that one as you can guess when you see him do the same in this one. Later he would be the stunt coordinator for MAD MAX 1 and 3. He seems like a goofy kind of Jim Henson creative countercultural type in this, so it never occurred to me that he’s the crazy bastard stalking Stacy Keach in the excellent ROAD GAMES. (more…)
The Man From Hong Kong
Sunday, April 12th, 2009
Two years after ENTER THE DRAGON, Brian Trenchard-Smith brought Australia their own Hong Kong co-production of a martial arts extravaganza. Jimmy Wang Yu (the One-Armed Swordsman himself) plays Inspector Fang, the man of the title, and he is a hell of a man. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him actually, he looks like kind of a dweeb, but throughout the course of the movie he will prove it. He is The Man from Hong Kong.
An Australian cop undercover as a tourist busts 22-year-old Sammo Hung (also the fight choreographer) during a drug deal. Inspector Hung is called in from Hong Kong to extradite Sammo. The two cops in charge of the case (including Hugh Keays-Byrne, Toecutter from MAD MAX) want Fang following Australian law, not trying to pull any shit, but they make the mistake of leaving him alone in the interrogation room with Sammo. This leads to a full-on close quarters kung fu battle. Not cool. But he gets a lead out of it.
The Australians want Fang to get his ass out of Australia quick, but for some reason he’s intent on using his unorthodox ways and what not to climb his way up the totem pole to rich Australian kung fu expert, playboy, criminal mastermind and expert party-thrower George Lazenby. In one scene he does the William Tell routine with a lady friend, which is movie code for “hey man this guy is decadent.” Another sign of his decadence: he has an open fireplace in the middle of a room in his mansion. No sides on it, just a fire right there. Before the Man From Hong Kong is through with him I think he regrets that sort of flamboyant interior design. It’s like that evil nurse chick in TRANSPORTER 2 having spikes on the wall in her living room. You evil fuckers gotta start thinking these things through better, it’s just not safe to live like that if somebody’s gonna come fight you in your place of residence. Also if you have kids would be another reason to avoid the spikes or open flames. And put those little plugs on all the electrical outlets. (more…)
Dead End Drive-In
Friday, April 3rd, 2009
Most Americans, when they think of Australia they think of kangaroos and koalas and shit. Me, I think of high speed car chases and vicious (but wise) giant crocodiles. And I guess maybe occasionally I think of 6′5″ Seattle Storm center Lauren Jackson. But usually it’s the cars and crocodiles, because as you maybe noticed I’ve been watching the Australian films this last year or so – ROGUE, DARK AGE, ROAD GAMES, RAZORBACK, etc. I’ve never been there, but something about that place really appeals to me, and so do their movies, I’m not sure why. They seem to have an untapped (by me) reservoir of really good filmatists there who work in a style that appeals to me. Energetic but not frantic, stylish but still raw, serious but not pretentious, lots of car flips.
I was kind of embarrassed though when I found out there was a documentary going around called NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD that lumps these movies together under the silly name “Ozploitation.” It was real popular down there in Austin where my Ain’t It Cool colleagues are and Tarantino’s interviewed in it and everything so it got them all interested. I swear it’s a coincidence, I had no idea this was a big thing right now. If anything, the documentary probaly copied the idea from me. (more…)
Road Games
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008After watching DARK AGE and ROGUE recently I started thinking about other Australian pictures, but without giant crocodiles: MAD MAX, RAZORBACK, CHOPPER, WOLF CREEK. And I thought holy shit (American for “crikey”) I gotta see some more Australiama or whatever it’s called. Actually, I have since learned that a documentary on Australian exploitation cinema played in Austin recently and got all my Ain’t It Cool colleagues excited about “Ozploitation.” I’m not ready to accept that term, that seems pretty forced. How bout if we call it “cinemarang.” Or “cinemaroo.” Or “Australian cinema” would be another good one.
Anyway I decided to watch this one by Richard Franklin, best known in the states for the surprisingly decent PSYCHO II. He did that one because he was obsessed with Hitchcock, studied all his movies, even got him to come speak at his film school. Can you believe that shit? “Good evening kids, I’m Alfred Hitchcock. Questions?” I wonder if he hung out in the dorms at all.
Anyway ROAD GAMES is definitely a Hitchcock homage, specifically it’s REAR WINDOW but crossed with Spielberg’s DUEL. Stacy Keach plays a truck driver who spends most of the movie talking to himself, or at least to his pet dingo. He makes up names for the people he sees on the road, and imagines what they’re up to. He has to play these “road games” to survive the long drives.
But then he sees a guy in a van pick up a hitchhiker, and then the same guy digging a hole. He decides this guy is the killer they’ve been talking about on the radio. Of course he tries to find out more and ends up getting into trouble. In one scene an old man seems to think he’s the killer, and there’s a very destructive vehicle chase with boat in tow. Jamie Lee Curtis shows up as a hitchhiker who’s as interested in following the guy as he is. Her name is Pamela but he just calls her “Hitch.” It could be called DINGO AND HITCH but luckily it’s called ROAD GAMES. (more…)
Dark Age and Tripwire
Sunday, September 28th, 2008DARK AGE
In my ongoing tribute to the land of MAD MAX and CHOPPER I have come across another good giant crocodile movie that pre-dates ROGUE by a good 20 years. But this one actually has John Jarrat – the widower Russell in ROGUE, the fuckin maniac in WOLF CREEK – as the park ranger hero.
This one reminds me of RAZORBACK a little, because it reminds me of JAWS a little. The director, Arch Nicholson, was second unit director on RAZORBACK, but his movie is in a more realistic vein, less stylized and exaggerated. The crocodile never runs through the side of a house and steals a baby like the razorback did. The photography is pretty naturalistic, it’s by Andrew Lesnie whose name seems familiar because he did the LORD OF THE RINGS movies, the BABE movies, and I AM LEGEND.
There’s a scene that has to be a deliberate homage to JAWS where everybody’s playing on the beach and a woman spots the croc and tries to warn the kids to get out of the water, but one kid gets eaten in front of everybody. But it’s an Australian twist because half of the kids on the beach are aborigines. That’s what makes this story unique is the conflict between the “white fellas” who just want to kill the crocodile, and the aborigines who won’t let them. (more…)
