|
|
movie news
|
Fri. 07 31. 2009 12:42 PM EDT
'Not Quite Hollywood': Wizards Of Oz, By Kurt Loder
The golden age of trash cinema, Down Under division.
Mel Gibson in "Mad Max," featured in "Not Quite Hollywood"
(
Magnet Releasing
)
One of the best of many strange and wonderful tales told in "Not Quite Hollywood," a rowdy new documentary about the 1970s heyday of Australian exploitation movies, is related by Dennis Hopper. Back
around 1976, when Hopper was famously out of his mind, he flew to Australia to collect a quick paycheck by appearing in a low-budget action film called "Mad Dog Morgan." A number of people weigh in on the making of this movie, actually, one of them recounting Hopper's insistence on speaking in a wild Irish brogue at all times. Hopper himself admits the production was further complicated by his extreme fondness, back then, for 151-proof Bacardi rum. In fact, the actor admits he used to guzzle the stuff by the bottle. One day, thoroughly marinated, he unwisely slid behind the wheel of a car and took off for a spin. Police soon pulled him over, evaluated his condition and escorted him straight to the airport. Hopper says that to this day he is prohibited, not just from ever driving a car in Australia again, but from ever even being a passenger in one.
Like the American Z-movie explosion of the 1970s, the one in Australia had its roots in the collapsing social norms at the end of the 1960s. With the introduction of a new R rating in 1971, Australian film censorship was swept away and a tidal swell of cheap horror films, biker flicks, car-crash epics, kung-fu quickies and lots of full-frontal nudity flooded into the country's drive-ins and grindhouses. These were pictures with titles like "Inn of the Damned," "Cars That Eat People" and "Pacific Banana," and as we see from the abundance of clips assembled here, they were sometimes-astonishing works of what-the-hell cinema. Pontificating critics disliked their crass American genre trappings ("I am of the opinion that Americans are scum," sniffs one such oracle interviewed for this film), but these movies helped launch the careers of several now-famous directors, among them George Miller, Bruce Beresford and Russell Mulcahy; and they've since spawned a sizable cult. "Saw" creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell pop up here to acknowledge their debts to Miller's "Mad Max" and Mulcahy's killer-pig classic, "Razorback"; and indefatigable fanboy Quentin Tarantino is all over the place talking up such pictures as the 1987 crocodile frightener "Dark Age" ("The only negative is, the croc isn't that good") and the 1978 "Patrick" — a "Psycho" rip-off from which he borrowed a bit of business for "Kill Bill: Vol. 1."
But it's the filmmakers' own reminiscences that make "Not Quite Hollywood" such a pungently entertaining experience. Miller recalls shooting "Mad Max" guerrilla-style in the vicinity of Melbourne, orchestrating full-tilt auto crack-ups and earth-shaking explosions without ever asking official permission. We see a pot-smoking scene from the 1974 biker film "Stone" that was so authentic, it took 25 hours to shoot. We learn that a 19-year-old Nicole Kidman was turned down for the lead in "Howling III: The Marsupials" because, as a producer puts it, "She wasn't werewolf enough." We're informed that in the filming of the 1982 "Turkey Shoot," a stuntman actually took a bullet because the guns in his scene — for reasons now unfathomable — were loaded with live ammo. Looking back on another picture, in which an actor was imposed upon to eat live frogs, an actress says, "I think we went into a new genre there."
As was also the case in this country, the advent of home video slowly brought Australia's no-holds-barred exploitation era to an end. But as we see in this racy overview, it was a lot of fun while it lasted. "We didn't kill anybody," says one industry veteran. "But we damaged some goods."
Don't miss Kurt Loder's reviews of "Funny People," "Thirst" and "The Collector," also new in theaters this week.
This report is from MTV News.
|
|
|
