Not Quite Hollywood

Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2008)

93% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 59 reviews)


Runtime: 103 minutes

Directed by: Mark Hartley

Starring: A bunch of interview clips with Australian actors, but also appearances by the likes of Dennis Hopper (RIP), Jamie Lee Curtis, and Stacy Keach

From: City Film Worldwide/Film Finance/Film Victoria

Let me say right away that I don’t plan on posting anything special for the Fourth of July on Sunday, or really see any sort of patriotic movies for my next review, for that matter. Sorry, but that’s how my schedule is. I do at least plan on posting some sort of review for Monday night, but in the meanwhile, here is a movie I found out about online awhile back and I recently saw that it was at the local Blockbuster, where I rented it for the night.

This is a documentary about the genre film scene in Australia and how it lasted from the early 70’s to the early 90’s, although it really petered out by the late 80’s. It’s broken into three parts: “nudie” comedies/dramas, horror, and action. Now, those types of genre films-but low-budget-were popular in the U.S. from about the early 60’s to the late 80’s, and of course those types of movies were popular with guys like Quentin Tarantino, which reflected in his works, and those types of movies were in grindhouses (and you got that experience in modern times in the should have been seen in theatres much more often by people film known as Grindhouse), and those Australian imports were in grindhouses over here too; many of those were seen by Tarantino and he was a big force in this documentary coming together. You see him often on screen too, along with the other actors that comment on the movies they were involved in.

I ended up enjoying the movie and how it recapped a scene that I had little knowledge of, aside from seeing the first two Mad Max motion pictures. The coverage of the nudie movies didn’t really appeal to me, but then again it wasn’t because of the movie and how it covered that scene, but rather because that scene looks to have “stupid humor” and I’m not usually appealed by that. The horror and action stuff, though, excited me. Some of it looks very off the wall odd. I guess because it’s a documentary it got an R rating, but note that you see graphic violence and blood and “graphic nudity” both male and female, which means yes you get to see all body parts, front and back from dudes and dudettes. As with the typical grindhouse movie faire, what you see brief clips from will look exciting and it will apparently be a movie full of mindless fun but more often than not the entire film is dull with small moments of lunacy. Take Tarantino using this formula-maybe too well-for his Death Proof part of Grindhouse, but that’s another topic for another day. Watching nutty moments from old genre faire is fun, which is why various companies have put out compilations of just trailers from old grindhouse movies, and why they have many fans, me included. That's why I marked out for seeing some gonzo footage from movies that I had little to no knowledge of.

So, if you enjoy documentaries on movies/the movie scene and you want to hear nutty tales of the old Australian film scene (for example, listening to how they did the craziest stunts or how live ammunition was used on film sets) then you should get a kick out of this.