This is Definitely ‘Not Quite Hollywood’
Who says I’m not always lookin’ out for you?
Your cinematic sugar mama has the documentary event you’ve been waiting for! “Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation.”
No, this has nothing to do with Ozzy Osbourne. This is all about the early days of Australian cinema.
Wait, wait. Don’t run away yet. Here. I’ll let the tag line of the movie sum it up best for you: “Finally, a documentary full of gratuitous nudity, senseless violence, car crashes…and a bit of kung fu.”
Ohhhh, daddy! They aren’t lyin’ one bit. I don’t think I’ve seen that much full-frontal nudity of both woman AND men, such violence and gore, such action-packed insanity in one 90-minute film in my whole life! Granted I’m not that old, but ya gotta admit I’ve seen my share of flicks.
They say you learn something new every day, and my brain was inundated!
Outside of “Mad Max” and maybe one or two other more modern films, I had never known much of anything about the Australian film industry. Apparently there wasn’t any such industry at all until the 1960s. As American films dominated the high-end film spectrum, Australia’s cutting edge filmmakers took the low road as they got started. They created wicked B-movies that got away with everything John Waters, William Castle and Roger Corman wished they could have put on a mainstream big screen.
I always knew the Aussies were fun, but Holy Cats!
The progression of Aussie films went from gross-out flicks, to sexploitation, gory horror, bloody action and, yes, kung fu. It all happened in the span of about 20 years from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s.
Mainstream Australians (particularly younger ones) ate up these homegrown movies. Some of these movies even saw minor success on the American drive-in scene. Some Australian directors even imported American stars such as Jaime Lee Curtis, Stacy Keach and Dennis Hopper.
Curtis, Hopper and director Quentin Tarantino give hefty interviews to the documentary, as do many early Australian stars and directors.
The most insane stuff they talk about in the documentary are the stunts. If it happened in an Ozploitation flick, it probably happened in real life. Motorcycles doing 140 mph, cars crashing while packed with explosives (and real drivers), stuntmen going over 100-foot cliffs–these guys had no problem risking life and limb of entire film crews just to get a good shot or sequence!
Watch this with a pen and pad handy. Be ready to jump on the pause button…to copy down the names of movies you want to now watch…not just to stare at the nekked people. Heck. Get yourself a Fosters and do it up right!


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