Not Quite Hollywood
Dir: Mark Hartley
Rating: 3.0/5.0
Magnet Releasing
100 Minutes
A topical look at the Australian Exploitation film industry of the ’70s and ’80s, Not Quite Hollywood is an entertaining love letter to the sex and slasher films that emerged from the land down under. Worthwhile for its plethora of hilarious excerpts featuring men fighting kangaroos, loads of nudity and graphic violence, Not Quite Hollywood not only pays homage to these films, but matches them with brisk energy combined with little substance. While most cineastes can peg Australian classics such as Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Hollywood allows this bevy of forgotten flicks to resurface.
Though director Mark Hartley, through a series of talking head interviews featuring Australian actors, producers, directors and fans such as Quentin Tarantino, makes the loose case that the Aussie predilection for tits and gore stemmed from the ’60s cultural revolution, the clips are the real draw here. Many of the films mentioned were initially dismissed by critics and soon forgotten after the next, gorier or sexier feature arrived. With the exception of Mad Max and maybe Razorback, most of the films referenced in Hollywood belong in the dusty bins of pop garbage.
For those looking for depth and historical context, Not Quite Hollywood is not the movie for you. If you want to see nudity, low-budget stunts, gore and Tarantino professing his love for every low-brow movie ever to come out of Australia, then buy yourself a ticket. As the Australian films began to engage in the battle of outdoing one another, the stunts became more ridiculous, the nudity more graphic and the violence more bloody. The apex comes in a clip of Fair Game where a marauding band terrorizes a woman, ultimately using her as a topless hood ornament.
In the age of CGI effects, it is refreshing to see a film that can remind us of cheesy costumes and stunts that took place with the aid of a computer. There is a raw vitality to these “Ozploitation” films that has been missing from almost every nook in the Hollywood system. Though Hartley makes the claim that current crap like Wolf Creek and Saw is an extension of this gung-ho excitement, he does not acknowledge that these plugged-in, jaded times are not the correct milieu for the wild-eyed innocence of these progenitors of the Australian B-movie. Even in Tarantino’s Death Proof there is a wry self-consciousness that completely prevents the bras from coming off and the blood to spurt without a wink. Not Quite Hollywood will remind us otherwise.
by David Harris
