Ozploitation: the Australian genre boom, 1971 to 1986

Australia barely had a film industry in 1970. Local production had been moribund for decades, the cinemas ran American and British pictures, and the government had just started worrying about it in the way governments do, with a development corporation and some money. Nobody in Canberra planned for the money to go mostly on breasts, car crashes and feral pigs.

The R certificate did what the funding bodies couldn't

The event that started the boom was regulatory. In 1971 Australia introduced an R certificate, a legal adults-only category, and for the first time a local producer could put real nudity and violence on screen and still get the film classified into a cinema. The prestige end of the resulting new wave, the tasteful period pieces the Australian Film Development Corporation liked to bankroll, is the part that got respectable write-ups. The part that made the money was the "ocker" sex comedy.

Alvin Purple (1973), directed by Tim Burstall, is the film that funded everything else. An ordinary young man is inexplicably irresistible to every woman he meets, and the picture is ninety minutes of that one joke. It was among the highest-grossing Australian films made to that point, it was critically loathed, and its success told distributors and investors that a domestic film could turn a profit at home. Every better film in this piece was paid for, directly or by example, by Alvin Purple. The respectable end of the new wave was spending money a one-joke sex comedy had banked first.

Peter Weir, before he was Peter Weir

The other 1971 landmark has its own long piece on this site, so briefly: Wake in Fright, Ted Kotcheff's study of a schoolteacher dissolving over five days in an outback mining town, is the best film the era produced and flopped completely, partly because Australians recognised themselves in it and objected.

The man who did more to set the tone was Peter Weir. His feature debut, The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), is a black comedy about a small country town that engineers car accidents on the road outside and lives off the wreckage and the survivors. It is strange, slow, and not entirely in command of its own idea, and it contains in miniature the whole thesis of the boom. The Australian landscape is hostile, the people out there have adapted to it in ways that should worry you, and the car is where the violence happens. Weir went on to Picnic at Hanging Rock and eventually Hollywood. The car half of his sensibility got picked up by everyone else.

The two that got out: Mad Max and Mad Max 2

Mad Max (1979) was directed by George Miller, a practising emergency-room doctor who had seen exactly what happens to human bodies at speed and put it on screen with a specificity nobody else bothered with. It was shot on public roads outside Melbourne for about A$400,000, most of which is visibly on the tarmac. For years it held the record for the most profitable film ever made measured against its cost, which is the only metric under which a first feature by a Melbourne doctor beats the studios.

The American distributor, convinced the accents were unsellable, dubbed the entire film into a flat mid-Atlantic voice. Find the original.

Mad Max 2 (1981) is where the look the whole world now files under "post-apocalypse" actually gets built: the leather, the dog, the war rig, and fuel as the only currency left that means anything. Almost everything after it that looks like the end of the world looks that way because of a sequel to an Australian carsploitation picture. Those two films are what actually left the country and stayed gone. Miller is the boom's one unqualified international success, and he got there by taking the genre completely seriously while everyone assumed he was slumming.

The stunts were real

One thing the whole cycle shared, from Miller down, was a stunt culture that ran on actual physical risk. There was no digital safety net and very little of the padded, permitted kind either. The era's central daredevil was Grant Page, who choreographed and performed the crashes and fire gags across dozens of these films and eventually got a picture built around him, Trenchard-Smith's Stunt Rock (1978), which barely functions as a narrative and exists purely to point a camera at a man doing dangerous things with no net under him. That appetite for real damage is a large part of why the Mad Max pictures look the way they do, and why so many of them still make a modern viewer wince at the mechanics rather than the effects.

The machine: Ginnane, Franklin, De Roche

Below Miller, the boom ran on a small number of people who worked constantly and knew precisely what they were making.

Antony I. Ginnane was the producer, a man with a real gift for assembling a genre package, selling it to foreign buyers before a frame was shot, and importing a fading American name to make it move in the States. Richard Franklin was his best director, a USC graduate and open Hitchcock obsessive who parlayed the Australian work into directing Psycho II in Hollywood. Everett De Roche was the screenwriter, and if this end of the boom has an author it is arguably him, since he wrote most of the horror titles anyone still watches.

Their calling card is Patrick (1978), Franklin directing a De Roche script for Ginnane. A comatose patient with psychic powers terrorises the staff of a hospital from a bed he never leaves, and the premise sounds idiotic until you watch Franklin wring an hour of dread out of a man who cannot move. It was a sizeable international hit, big enough that Italy shot an unauthorised gore-drenched knock-off, Patrick Still Lives, which shares nothing with the original but the name.

Franklin and De Roche went out again without Ginnane for Road Games (1981), the cleverest thing the era produced: Rear Window relocated to a truck cab crossing the Nullarbor Plain, with Stacy Keach as a philosophising long-haul driver certain that a fellow motorist is a killer, and Jamie Lee Curtis, imported at the peak of her slasher fame, as the hitchhiker who may not last the trip. At roughly A$1.7 million it was the most expensive Australian film made to that date, and it looks it.

De Roche's other essential is Long Weekend (1978), directed by Colin Eggleston. A miserable couple go camping, treat the bush with contempt, and the bush kills them for it. No monster, no villain, just an ecosystem holding a grudge and a sea eagle that means business. It is the purest version of the idea running under the entire movement, that the land itself wants you gone.

10BA, and the flood

In 1981 the federal government introduced a tax concession, Division 10BA, that let investors deduct 150 per cent of what they sank into a film and treat part of the return as tax-free. The effect was immediate and slightly deranged. Film financing stopped being about films and became about tax structures, money arrived from investors who did not much care what got made, and the early 1980s produced a glut.

Some of it was good. Brian Trenchard-Smith, the boom's most cheerfully reckless director, made Turkey Shoot (1982), a near-future dystopia in which inmates of a re-education camp are hunted for sport by the elite. The budget was slashed by roughly half partway through the shoot, and the film's answer was to jettison whatever restraint it had left and pile on gore and camp until the seams showed. It is a mess and it is enormous fun, which is a fair summary of Trenchard-Smith across the board.

Russell Mulcahy, arriving straight from music videos, shot Razorback (1984) as though a giant feral pig demolishing the outback were the most glamorous subject on earth. Fog, blue light, slow motion, and the monster kept mostly off screen. It is the best-looking film in the whole cycle and one of the last with real money behind it.

Why it ended

The tax party could not hold. 10BA was wound back in stages from 1983 as the government noticed it was subsidising a great deal of unsellable rubbish, the easy money evaporated, and the drive-ins that had been the natural home for this material were closing across the country. Trenchard-Smith more or less filmed the wake himself with Dead End Drive-In (1986), a dystopia set in a drive-in cinema converted into an internment camp. The drive-ins that raised the movement were closing for good; Trenchard-Smith shot one as a prison.

The talent scattered upward and outward. Miller, Weir, Franklin, Mulcahy and Kotcheff all moved on to Hollywood or to bigger budgets. What they left is roughly fifteen years of cheap, mean, frequently brilliant films held together by a single conviction, that the country is trying to kill you and the people who live there have made a private peace with it.

The whole thing only acquired a proper name in hindsight, when Mark Hartley's documentary Not Quite Hollywood (2008) rounded up the survivors and a delighted Quentin Tarantino and put the label into wide circulation. The name it handed them was Ozploitation, and most of the people who made the films had never heard it.