If ever there was truth in movie titles, "Not Quite Hollywood" leads the pack.
A documentary and an appreciation of the rowdy side of Australian filmmaking of the 1970s and ‘80s, writer-director Mark Hartley has scoured the archives to create a highly entertaining montage of sex and violence, gore and grandiosity, with a huge range of famous and not-so-famous faces and voices – and bodies – showing up in some of the strangest places. There are only occasional, and brief, references to classics like "The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith," "My Brilliant Career," "Picnic at Hanging Rock" and others, but as one filmmaker put it, we are dealing with a time when audiences "preferred fornication and hallucination to whatever preceded it (sic)."
Quentin Tarantino, sitting in a theater, serves as a sort of narrator, but mostly he’s a celebrator of the over-the-top antics. For example, he is practically speechless with wonder over a scene in "Fair Game," when buxom starlet Cassandra Delaney is stripped and tied to the front of a pickup truck which then speeds down the road. As Tarantino says, in sheer and vulgar admiration, "What in the X?$!& world could they have been thinking of!"
The violence is as out-front as the sex, with decapitation, mutilation, torture and deaths by the dozen make blood as common as ketchup at a hamburger joint.
The blonde and the buxom, like Delaney, Lynda Stoner, Wendy Hughes and others, are prominently displayed, as are stunt people like Grant Page, martial arts experts like Jimmy Wang Yu and a wildly inebriated Dennis Hopper, in his pre-dry days, tearing up the set in "Mad Dog" (or "Mad Dog Morgan") and clips from "Yankee Zephyr," in which three people died. Page, one of the legendary stunt performers, recalls the days when safety equipment was marginal, if it existed at all, but when amazing stunts still went on.
Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis discuss their time in Australia to film "Road Games," and director George Miller talks about the original "Mad Max," starring a very young Mel Gibson. Barry Humphries, better known as Dame Edna, also is a participant, as are George Lazenby, John Waters, Spike Milligan and many others, some familiar, some not.
It makes no difference. Any movie fan will be as transfixed as I was watching and listening to this superb piece of filmmaking, wonderful entertainment and a glorious tribute to the Australian industry. On a more philosophical level, the most important line may come from a filmmaker who points out, in defense of sleaze and over-the-top activities, that there always are people in the audience who "see satire as documentary."
Opens today at the Plaza Frontenac
-Joe
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