Ozploitation

Ozploitation covers Australian genre cinema from roughly 1971 to 1988: horror, car films, thrillers, action and sex comedies made during a window when the Australian government would fund almost anything with a camera pointed at it.

The industry did not exist, and then it did

This is the part that makes the cycle unusual. Australia had almost no feature film industry at all between the mid-1930s and 1970. For about thirty-five years the country produced a handful of features per decade.

Two policy decisions changed that. The Gorton government set up film funding bodies in 1970. Then in 1981 came 10BA, a tax concession allowing investors to write off 150% of a film investment and pay no tax on the first 50% of any return. This is an extraordinary arrangement: an investor could profit on a film that lost money.

Capital arrived immediately, mostly from people with no interest in cinema. Production went from nothing to hundreds of features.

The R certificate

The other enabling change was censorship. Australia introduced an R rating in 1971, having previously operated one of the more restrictive regimes in the English-speaking world. Suddenly there was a legal category for adult content and an industry with money and no idea what to make.

Stork and The Adventures of Barry McKenzie came first, then the "ocker" comedies, then Alvin Purple (1973), a sex comedy which became one of the highest-grossing Australian films ever made and set the commercial direction for a decade.

The house style

Real stunts, real vehicles, real fire, performed by people with a safety culture best described as absent. Mad Max (1979) was shot for around A$400,000, largely on public roads, by a crew who closed sections of highway with limited authority to do so. Director George Miller was an emergency room doctor, which is either reassuring or not.

Grant Page is the central figure. He was the stunt coordinator or performer on a large share of the cycle, spent much of the 1970s being set on fire, and is the subject of the documentary Stunt Rock (1978), a film that exists purely so he can do stunts in it.

The recurring subject

The land is trying to kill you, and so is everyone on it.

Wake in Fright (1971) is the purest version: the threat is a mining town whose hospitality cannot be refused. Long Weekend (1978) has a couple mistreat the bush and get systematically dismantled by it. Razorback (1984) uses a giant pig. Patrick (1978) stays indoors and uses a coma patient.

The good ones share a conviction that the Australian interior is hostile and that the people who live there have adapted in ways a city visitor should find alarming.

What it produced

Mad Max is the one with global consequences. It cost almost nothing, took an enormous amount worldwide, made Mel Gibson, and its sequel set the visual template for the entire international post-nuke cycle.

About the label

Mark Hartley coined "Ozploitation" for his 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood, which is the best single introduction to the period and worth watching before any of the films.

Several of the filmmakers dislike the word. Ted Kotcheff has pointed out that Wake in Fright is not an exploitation film, and he is right: it is a serious literary adaptation that premiered at Cannes. The term flattens that distinction, and it stuck anyway.

Where to start

Wake in Fright is the best film. Mad Max is the most consequential. Long Weekend is the one nobody sees coming.