The Enduring Legacy of Ozploitation
Even as an adult, the outback scares me. More than spiders or snakes or sharks — the favoured iconography of Australia’s deadliness — the remoteness, the vast nothingness where one could easily lose their way, never to be found again — is an endlessly terrifying thought.
Whether it be the impenetrable maze of the Tasmanian bushlands, or the vast nothingness of the rural countryside, it’s easy to see the dark side to Australia’s natural beauty. Add in the impenetrable isolation — where you can be hundreds of kilometres from the nearest town or city — and you have a recipe for dread that not even daylight can overcome.
So it shouldn’t be surprising, really, that a whole sub-genre of film has exploited this terror. Starting in the 1970s as the bastard offshoot of the golden age of the Australian New Wave of filmmaking, Ozploitation used the burnt sepia of 1970s film to capture the dread of the Australian landscape perfectly.
These films rarely featured ghastly monsters in tight corridors. The horror stems from the frightening isolation and mystery of Australia’s wide-open spaces. Our heros are at the mercy of the outback, separated from the rest of the world, with little hope of survival.
Before 1970, Australia produced almost no horror movies of note. The country’s censorship system outright banned many films deemed too gruesome, sexual or ‘offensive’. When the newly minted Australian Classification Board relented and established the R rating for films in 1971, Australian horror could finally find its voice. And did it ever.
These cheap and sleazy pictures catapulted terror of the Australian outback to every drive-in and video store in the United States for a solid two decades.
The very definition of B-grade, Ozploitation movies were scummy, grimy and often brutal watches that played on the worst stereotypes of the continent. Violent bogans? Check. Gratuitous sex? Very often. Thick Australian accents? You better believe it, mate. In a decision destined to age badly, The Man From Hong Kong (1975) even opened with a kung-fu fight at the top of Uluru.
Even in their heyday, Ozploitation was largely ignored by Australian critics and audiences. It was not uncommon for Ozploitation films to bomb hard at the Australian box office, where they were lucky to make back their budget from local theatres. When critics deigned to review these films, they were just as harsh.
With almost no hometown audience, the film negatives languished in vaults and private collections for decades. Instead, it was up to American schlock connoisseurs like Quentin Tarrantino, and more liberal critics in the United States and Europe to proselytise the virtues of Aussie horror. In fact, the term Ozploitation wasn’t coined until 2008 in Mark Harley’s seminal documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!, the definitive look at a sub-genre otherwise lost to history.
Rather than giving the world an image of raving biker gangs running across the vast countryside, “Australians were more interested in the sanitized history depicted in Gallipoli (1981), or the toned-down horror of Australia’s mysterious bushland in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).
This ‘cultural cringe’, first described by social commentator AA Phillips in 1950, often leads to Australians ignoring or devaluing our own culture. That’s especially true for horror films, which are already perceived as a b-class of film. During a screening of Wake in Fright (1971), a psychological thriller with loathsome characters set in the outback, it’s reported that one audience member stood up and shouted “that’s not us!”
That narrow view has meant a lot of Australian’s have starved themselves of some quality scares. No doubt the MVP of outback spooks was Everett De Roche, an American-born screenwriter who emigrated to Australia in his 20s. Many of the best films to emerge from this era were penned by this horror maestro, including Patrick, Roadgames (1981) and Razorback (1984). Each of these films stand-up as legitimately unsettling films all these years later, standing among the best horror films of the era. Roadgames, in particular, is a leather-tight thriller inciting terror for Australia’s vast roadways.
De Roche’s protagonists were usually Americans like himself, struggling to face Australia’s vast and barren landscape. Razorback (1984) has an American reporter come to the Outback, only to be hunted by an oversized razorback hog. Thematically, the closest cousin would be the Steven Spielberg classic Jaws (1975), both revolving around an eccentric outcast hunting an animatronic beast.
And that ultra-violent sensibility endeared De Roche to at least one Hollywood icon. “Almost everything that Everett DeRoche wrote is one of my favourite films,” said Quentin Tarantino — director of Pulp Fiction (1994)and the Kill Bill films — in 2008.
Let it be said though that not all of the releases were a De Roche special. While the Ozploitation canon is brimming with silver screen delights, most were dreadful — and not in a good way. Films like Roadgames are outliers in a movement filled with works like Howling III, a werewolf film with a 17% rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. There’s enough schlock here to make John Waters look like Federico Fellini, which makes it tough to recommend people go and dig in without some assistance.
Australia’s history of cinematic gore probably has a lot more to do with money (or lack thereof) than creative freedom. The sparse needs of a horror film fit snugly into a film industry always cash strapped. Without well-financed studios or producers, filmmakers took to schlock as a way to get their projects off the ground.
Many of these productions, working outside any semblance of a film studio, were made on a garrote wire-thin budget. But within those financial restrictions, creativity flourished. Regardless of the quality or content of the film, almost all carry around a DIY Punk aesthetic, willing to break rules and conventions where they saw fit. Much of the time, an anti-authoritarian ideology bled into the celluloid of these films, whether it be loners fighting against the system in the original Mad Max (1979), or revelling in the failure of society in the likes of Patrick (1978).
This devil-may-cry attitude was found in both the content, as well as the production. The need to get the most bombastic shot often meant putting their crews in harm’s way.
A lucky side-effect of these budget restraints meant that local actors had a chance to shine on the silver screen for the first time. Academy Award-winning actress Nicole Kidman had one of her first breaks with BMX Bandits (1983), a crime comedy film about a group of BMX riders who stop a Sydney side bank heist.
While Ozploitation horror films became scarce through the 90s and early 2000s, recent films are certainly digging deep into the horror canon for inspiration. 2005’s Wolf Creek looks and feels like a modern take on the grindhouse glamour of films like Roadgames and Long Weekend (1978); Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale (2018) — her follow-up to The Babadook (2014) — is a bone-crunching film to watch, right in line with other Ozploitation classics.
That homage to classic homegrown horror looks set to continue. Earlier this year, genre film distributor Monster Pictures and film producer Chris Brown announced the formation of a new horror studio in the vein of Blumhouse Productions. The plan is to release five pictures over the next three years, each with a budget less than $2.5 million. If successful, we could see a resurgence of Australian horror. And no doubt, they’ll be looking to the ghoulish efforts of the Ozploitation buccaneer’s for inspiration.
Originally published at https://www.lanewaydispatch.com on October 29, 2020.
