The Ozploitation Canon

For a long stretch, respectable Australian film culture preferred to remember the 1970s and 80s for its handsome literary period pieces and forget the other thing entirely — the flood of horror, action and exploitation pictures that filled the drive-ins and made most of the money. Those films earned the affectionate label “Ozploitation”, popularised by Mark Hartley’s 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood, which rounded up the survivors and made the case that this disreputable cinema was the real engine of the Australian film revival. The wave was fuelled by an “R” certificate introduced in 1971 and a generous tax-incentive scheme, and it produced work that is often crude, frequently brilliant and unmistakably local — the outback as a place of genuine menace, the road as a killing ground. I lay out how it happened, and why the establishment looked away, in the Ozploitation boom and the films Australia disowned. This is the canon that boom left behind.

The outback as nightmare

The land itself is the first monster in Australian genre cinema, vast and indifferent and quietly hostile.

Wake in Fright (1971). Ted Kotcheff’s ferocious film about a schoolteacher stranded in a mining town and slowly unravelling through drink, gambling and a notorious kangaroo hunt is the foundation stone of the whole movement. It played at Cannes, appalled and impressed in equal measure, then very nearly vanished — its negative was found in a Pittsburgh warehouse marked for destruction and restored only in 2009. It remains one of the great films about masculinity curdling in the heat, and I make the full case in Wake in Fright: the outback as waking nightmare. On the specialist restorations.

Long Weekend (1978). Colin Eggleston directed and Everett De Roche wrote this lean eco-horror about a bickering couple who treat the natural world with contempt on a camping trip, and find it beginning to treat them the same way. It is patient, ominous and genuinely unnerving, achieving its dread almost entirely through atmosphere and the sense of a landscape turning against intruders. On the Synapse and specialist releases.

The road and the machine

Then the wave found its true home on the highway, where the car became both freedom and weapon.

The Cars That Ate Paris (1974). Peter Weir’s feature debut is a black comedy about a small town, Paris, that engineers car crashes and lives off the wreckage and the survivors. It is stranger and funnier than its reputation suggests, and it points forward to the road-movie violence the wave would perfect, from a director who would soon be feted for far more respectable work. On the specialist Blu-ray editions.

Mad Max (1979). George Miller made his low-budget revenge film on the highways outside Melbourne and accidentally launched one of cinema’s great franchises, along with the career of Mel Gibson. Its vision of a society fraying at the edges, its extraordinary vehicular stunts and its lean, brutal storytelling made it a global sensation and the Ozploitation wave’s most famous export by a wide margin. Available everywhere on 4K, disc and streaming.

Roadgames (1981). Richard Franklin, an avowed Hitchcock devotee, turned the highway into a Rear Window on wheels, with Stacy Keach as a trucker convinced a fellow driver is a serial killer and Jamie Lee Curtis along for the ride. It is the most elegant and controlled thriller of the cycle, proof that the wave could do suspense with real craft. On the Umbrella and specialist releases.

Monsters and mayhem

Patrick (1978). Another Franklin film, this one a genuine international hit, concerns a comatose patient wielding psychic powers from his hospital bed, and it was popular enough abroad to spawn an Italian unofficial sequel. Franklin builds real tension from a static premise, and the film’s success helped prove Australian genre cinema could travel. On the specialist restorations.

Turkey Shoot (1982). Brian Trenchard-Smith’s dystopian film, in which inmates of a future prison camp are hunted for sport, is the wave at its most gleefully excessive, a savage satire that plays like a fever dream of budget cuts and bad taste. Its production was reportedly chaotic and its violence extreme, and it has become a beloved cult item precisely for its refusal of restraint. On the Umbrella cult releases.

Razorback (1984). Russell Mulcahy, fresh from directing music videos, brought a startling visual sensibility to this tale of a giant feral boar terrorising the outback, drenching the landscape in fog and coloured light. The monster effects are shaky, and it barely matters, because the film’s dreamlike imagery is genuinely beautiful and unlike anything else in the canon. On the Warner Archive and specialist discs.

The inheritor

The wave officially faded, and its DNA never left — it simply grew up.

Animal Kingdom (2010). David Michôd’s cold, controlled crime drama about a Melbourne family of criminals collapsing under police pressure is a world away from the drive-in in polish, and unmistakably descended from the wave’s fascination with Australian menace and moral rot. Jacki Weaver’s monstrous matriarch earned an Oscar nomination, and the film proved the country’s genre instincts had matured into something internationally acclaimed. I unpack it in Animal Kingdom: the Australian crime family from hell. Widely available on disc and streaming.

Where to start

The Ozploitation films were made to play loud in the dark to audiences the critics ignored, and that is still the best way to meet them — with the expectation of energy and invention rather than polish. Begin with Wake in Fright to understand the dread the whole movement is built on, Mad Max to see it conquer the world, and Razorback to watch it turn genuinely strange and beautiful. Then follow the line forward to Animal Kingdom to see where all that disreputable energy finally earned its respectability. For a parallel story of a national cinema built from cheap, disowned genre films that outlasted their critics, see my blaxploitation canon.

How the boom actually happened

The Ozploitation wave was a product of policy as much as talent. The introduction of the “R” adults-only classification in 1971 suddenly made it legal to show — and to make — films with the sex and violence the market plainly wanted, ending decades of restrictive censorship in a single stroke. At the same time, government tax-incentive schemes, most notoriously the generous 10BA arrangements of the early 1980s, poured money into film production and made it briefly attractive to bankroll cheap genre pictures with a strong chance of turning a profit at the drive-in and on the growing export and video markets. The result was a gold rush of horror, action, comedy and thriller films made fast and sold hard, often by first-time directors who would either burn out or, like Peter Weir and George Miller, go on to major international careers. The respectable “Australian New Wave” of prestige literary adaptations and the disreputable Ozploitation cycle grew from the same soil and the same funding, which is precisely why the establishment’s later embarrassment about the genre films rings so false. Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood did the real service of putting them back in the family photograph.

A few more for the initiated

Ten films only scratch the surface of a remarkably deep bench. Mad Max 2 (1981), released abroad as The Road Warrior, is by common consent superior to the original and one of the greatest action films ever made, expanding the wasteland into full-blown post-apocalyptic myth. The Last Wave (1977) sees Peter Weir edge his eco-dread toward genuine art-cinema unease. Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Dead End Drive-In (1986) offers a sharp dystopian satire set, fittingly, in the very drive-ins these films played. And for proof that the tradition never died, Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown (2011) carries the wave’s fascination with Australian violence into some of the bleakest territory the national cinema has ever entered. Pull any of these threads and you find the same restless, unrespectable energy that makes Ozploitation one of the most rewarding rabbit holes in world genre film.

What ties the whole canon together is a particular relationship to place. Where American genre cinema tends to locate horror in the house or the city, the Australian version keeps returning to the land itself — the outback, the highway, the empty distance between towns — as something ancient, watchful and unimpressed by the people scurrying across it. That instinct is the wave’s real inheritance, and you can feel it running unbroken from the sun-baked delirium of Wake in Fright to the cold suburban dread of Animal Kingdom. You can trace it further still, into the desert menace of Wolf Creek and the outback-gothic unease of contemporary directors like Sean Byrne and Jennifer Kent, whose work carries the same landscape-as-antagonist charge into the arthouse. The films were disowned for their crudeness; they endure for their conviction.