The Ozploitation Boom and the Films Australia Disowned

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Every national cinema has a respectable face it shows the world and a disreputable one it keeps in the shed. Australia’s respectable face, for most of the last fifty years, has been a run of tasteful period dramas: schoolgirls vanishing on a sun-blanched rock, spirited heroines in high-collared dresses, honourable men doomed by empire. Its disreputable face has fangs. It is the outback that eats a man alive, the killer boar the size of a car, the drive-in built as a prison camp, and the wild pornographic comedies that outsold the prestige pictures at home while the critics looked at their shoes. For years the country pretended the second face was not its own. Then it turned out the shed was where the most durable work had been hiding all along.

The Ozploitation Canon

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 14:00:00 +0000

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.

Ozploitation - vo.rs

The Ozploitation Boom and the Films Australia Disowned

The Ozploitation Canon