They were tacky, explicit, gory, smutty and violent, with buckets of blood, projectile vomiting, explosive car chases and drunk actors - but they were popular with audiences. Australian 'Ozploitation' genre films of the 1970s and 80s are celebrated in a new documentary, Not Quite Hollywood, now screening at the Hong Kong International Film Festival.
Featuring interviews with fans of the genre including directors Quentin Tarantino, George Miller and Brian Trenchard-Smith, and actors Dennis Hopper, Jamie Lee Curtis and Barry Humphries, Not Quite Hollywood highlights the mayhem both in front of and behind the camera that resulted in such Australian classics as Mad Max, Mad Dog Morgan and Alvin Purple.
Not Quite Hollywood writer and director Mark Hartley says he was inspired to make the documentary after finding a dearth of information available about the popular but low-brow films. 'I saw these films on late-night TV and they were not the Australian films I was used to seeing,' he says. 'They had Australian accents and they were in Australian locations, but they were more like American films. We were never really told we had these really big films overseas. We heard how Picnic at Hanging Rock played to a full house in New York but we didn't hear The Man from Hong Kong was playing in 15 [cinemas].'
In the documentary, producers discuss Hopper's performance in the title role of Mad Dog Morgan (1976). 'Dennis was a full-on method actor,' producer Antony Ginnane says. 'That was convenient for him because Mad Dog drank a lot of rum.'
In another scene, former Bond star George Lazenby recounts how he burned his arm after being set on fire for a fight scene in The Man from Hong Kong (1975), saying: 'Well after the director set himself on fire, I thought, 'Geez, if he's going to do it, I'll have to do it.'' The film went on to become a worldwide hit.
Hartley says he hopes his film will remind people of the genre and its creators. 'They were just as talented as the more revered directors, but just because they chose to make this type of film, they have been forgotten,' he says. 'They really just did it. There was a kind of Australian, larrikin, can-do energy to the films.'