The Cameraman's Revenge

I was (and am) a huge admirer of Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood, so the prospect of him taking on Filipino exploitation cinema struck me as a good thing; my own experience of the stuff is limited to a couple of Eddie Romero movies, Weng Weng (obviously) and Willie Milan’s remarkable W is War, so a primer on this sort of thing seemed like an excellent idea. There is a rather crucial distinction between the two films, though, in that NQH is about the Australian film industry but MMU is actually really about American exploitation cinema of the period that happened to use the Philippines as a filming location (especially those released by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures) and not about the actual Filipino industry itself. Apparently there was a pragmatic reason for this, namely that, frankly, those films produced for US release still exist, whereas a lot of the films produced for the home market just don’t (the Philippines was the last country in the world to establish a film archive, as recently as last October). That said, there’s plenty of insight to be gained, and if the portrait of the local filmmaking style in the film and the DVD extras is accurate, then “cavalier” doesn’t begin to describe it. Indeed, in some respects the additional interview footage is where the really jaw-dropping stuff lies; there are astounding tales of insanely unsafe stuntwork, and a genuinely horrifying near-rape story involving performers who apparently thought they were being paid to really rape the actress. As if the country’s dodgy political situation wasn’t sufficiently troubling, you had situations like this that went beyond mere incompetence to something quite disturbing. Accordingly Machete Maidens Unleashed ends up (perhaps inadvertently) as a fairly unflattering portrait of the American producers like Corman who went to the Philippines to shoot films cos it was cheap, leaving a slightly bitter sense that these were indeed “exploitation films” in a darker way than usual…

So why have I never seen this before? I’m sure it was a film I fully intended to see back when it came out, or failing that (as I did) at least I should’ve seen it at home before now… Have  I missed it on TV? Probably several times. I don’t know why, cos it was a film I actually did have an interest in seeing… Anyway, JB Hifi were having one of their 3-for-the-price-of-2 DVD sales recently, so I picked it up then… the “director’s cut”, too, which I gather is the version to go for; I don’t know all the differences but I understand the biggest change is the removal of a spoileriffic narration at the start of the film. Apparently the studio insisted on this so the audience wouldn’t be stumped by the film, and to a certain degree I can understand their fear; Dark City takes its sweet damn time in unveiling its secrets and is quite happy to leave you scratching your head with the letters W, T and F. I think everything does come together in the end, although I think there’s a few loose ends even so, but I will give it credit for not just being the style over substance affair I was initially expecting (especially cos that was pretty much how I viewed The Crow and Spirits of the Air Gremlins of the Clouds, the other two Alex Proyas films I’ve seen) and which a lot of critics seem to have accused it of being. Not that style doesn’t reign supreme, of course, and once you get past the narrative mystery the visual aspect is by far the film’s most engaging element; the stunning look of the thing really is its chief attraction. By the end I wound up liking it rather more than I thought I was going to for the first 45 minutes or so, though I’m not sure it’s quite the underappreciated masterpiece the accompanying DVD features would like to paint it as.

I suspect that, insofar as most people who watch this film choose to do so, it’s because they’re looking for a bit of trashy 80s exploitation action. Maybe a handful of people watch it for the 80s hair (particularly Wilbur Wilde’s astounding mullet). Me, I wanted to watch it because it was actually filmed around the suburb where I live. Matraville is not a motion picture Mecca, and even at the time I don’t recall ever hearing about this happening (I was what, 10 at the time? You’d think even someone else at school would’ve heard a film was being made in Matraville of all places. Mum says she dimly remembers hearing about it); in fact, though I’d heard of the film (albeit a number of years later) I only recently got told by a friend of mine (who doesn’t even live in NSW, let alone Sydney) that the titular drive-in was the old one at Matraville. It’s an interesting choice of location for a story about a drive-in being used as a kind of concentration camp shut off from the rest of the world, cos Matraville is kind of like that (to paraphrase Gustav Mahler, when the societal apocalypse the film depicts actually strikes Matraville is the last place it’ll strike, especially if the apocalypse comes here by bus); not the loveliest place in the world, and yet I experience a quite inordinate and inexplicable thrill by seeing it on the screen like this. The produce growers’ market! The Port Botany turnoff! The servo at the corner of Bunnerong and Franklin! The railway yard! REPRESENT! Mad Max: Beyond Maroubra Junction… Trenchard-Smith bemoans one bit where you can see all the houses surrounding the drive-in, thus revealing it’s far less isolated than he’d like us to believe, but given that Long Bay Jail is just down the road and surrounded by houses in exactly that manner, I wasn’t bothered by it…

Incidentally, I’ve also read the Peter Carey short story, “Crabs”, on which this thing is based. It’s in a collection of his short stories, which I found myself unable to read apart from “Crabs” and a few more because something about the stories irritated the crap out of me (I’ve always thought the quote on the back from… well, whoever it was, some other well-regarded author about how “reading Carey’s prose is like being shot by a firing squad of angels” is possibly the most ludicrously OTT blurb of its kind ever written, it probably deterred me as much as Carey’s prose itself), and I don’t really recall much about it, although I’m fairly sure not a lot of the film’s content really matches up with that of the story. But, you know, Carey probably didn’t expect his story to be turned into, well, this. It is, obviously, unquestionable trash and I don’t think there’s much in the way of Higher Thoughts going on, it’s a B exploiter of the sort that would’ve played at the drive-in itself… and yet, at the same, it seems to almost be making a serious point amidst the neon decor and the cut-price punks and car wrecks. This society of outcasts isn’t really so far removed from the one that’s confined it in the drive-in, it has its own prevailing attitudes that are easy to just fall into, and unquestioning acceptance of what the government gives them, except when the government gives them a bunch of Asian newcomers; the society outside finds them unacceptable and the drive-in’s inhabitants don’t want these gooks coming in and taking, well, whatever the hell it is they’ve got. The race angle is heavy-handed (and apparently even then it’s been toned down from Trenchard-Smith’s original intentions), but it does help make another point, perhaps, about how self-professed “individuals” seem wind up being just as conformist in their own way, whether or not they admit it even to themselves, and that it doesn’t really take much to make them that way…

So we end our tour of Umbrella’s Ozploitation collections in a… well, slightly confused manner. Unlike pretty much all the other films we’ve been looking at (plus Razorback, of course, which I reviewed ages ago), I don’t recall this even getting a namecheck in Not Quite Hollywood, and to be honest I’m a bit surprised to find it on DVD at all, let alone part of this series. I was puzzled, too, as to why Humphries didn’t try making a Les Patterson film long before this; and finally I’m puzzled as to why this was the one he did eventually make. Sir Les gets appointed to an Arab state called Abu Niveah as punishment for offending that country’s leader by farting on and igniting him; he arrives amdist a military coup, headed by one Colonel Godowni who’s determined to hold the world to ransom with a fairly revolting bioweapon spread by contact with toilet seats. Yes, it’s toilet humour of a screamingly literal sort… Even Humphries admits in the interview on the DVD that it was one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time, and maybe it was in the early planning stages, but things seem to have deviated from those first ideas; and though he says the HELP plague wasn’t meant to be a metaphor for AIDS, he concedes it could’ve been read as such and that it probably doomed the film to the general condemnation it received. In fairness, Dame Edna does get some actually funny business (and teaming the two characters is one of the few really good ideas the film has), and it’s a remarkably good-looking production, don’t know what the budget was but it surely looks expensive… but god/dess, what material to waste such expense on for so little return; to be honest, there’s been a few titles in this series I likely would never have seen had Umbrella not collected them together, probably wouldn’t have missed them either, and this was one of those. Still, I didn’t expect much from it and I can’t say it didn’t deliver…

And so to what is still probably the most notorious film in the entire Ozploitation set, Brian Trenchard-Smith’s update of The Most Dangerous Game to a (then) near-future fascist society of indeterminate location (the accents are even more confusing and wobbly than in Harlequin). Wherever it is, there are concentration camps for “deviants”, at one of which a select few get to have their re-education interrupted to become targets for the operators of the camp when the latter feel like a bit of sport. Lots of violence ensues. Turkey Shoot was a troubled production with performers who were less than thrilled to be involved (looking at you in particular here, Olivia Hussey) and one of the financiers pulling out, causing the loss of over a quarter of the budget, two weeks of shooting and about 20 pages of script, most of which were apparently meant to establish the future setting; the end result is pretty reprehensible in a lot of departments—acting (if that’s the word for it), logic, Roger Ward’s moustache, Gus Mercurio’s accent—and yet there’s something perversely admirable about the manifest glee with which it goes about presenting these atrocities, about its whole-hearted embrace of its own trashiness, about Trenchard-Smith’s determination to make something out of a bad situation and his evident belief that the best way to go about it was to ramp up the excess and bugger naturalism. I mean, once Alph enters the picture—and what the fuck was Alph actually supposed to be, anyway?—any pretence at anything like depth just evaporates; anyone who watches this film expecting anything other than a grossly exploitative, over the top, ludicrously violent, blackly comic action movie probably deserves what they get, really. I’m not sure if there’s any conventional standard by which this can actually be described as a good film per se, but I had a lot of fun watching it.

This Ozploitation series has been a real crash course in the early work of Richard Franklin, hasn’t it? Admittedly, I don’t know if I’d have got that Roadgames was meant to be Franklin’s riff on Rear Window if he hadn’t said as much (Duel is the rather more obvious, if reversed, point of reference), but now that I know I see it’s actually a pretty clever move, inverting Hitchcock’s man trapped in one room to a man trapped in the wide open spaces of the Nullarbor Plain… Stacy Keach is Quid, a man who drives trucks but insists he ‘s not a truck driver; it’s a lonely life, just him and a dingo in perpetual danger of being shot as a pest, and Quid may not be, well, the full quid as a result. For example, is there really a serial killer in that green van which seems to keep tailing him on his latest job transporting pig carcasses to Perth? Or is he extrapolating based upon radio news reports because the isolation and tiredness has left him less than fully hinged? Franklin was kind of selling himself as a local Hitchcock, and to be sure Roadgames is about as fair an imitation of Hitch as you could get; the production was a bit troubled by the crew being unhappy about the two leads being American—Jamie Lee Curtis being the other, although I was surprised to discover just how small her role actually is—but there’s no real sense of this in the film, which adds up to a fairly pleasing and mostly effective mix of humour, thrills and stunt action (the latter courtesy of Grant Page, who also gets to play the van driver). Apparently the most expensive Australian film ever at the time ($1.8m budget), and certainly one of the best films in the Ozploitation DVD series.

Trivia: Mark Spain (the boy Alex in this film) once called me “hairy motherfucker” in the men’s bathroom at the Sly Fox Hotel in Enmore. He then apologised profusely when he realised he’d mistaken me for someone else. THAT’S BESIDE THE POINT, though, which is that this film confuses me. What fucking country is it supposed to be set in, I ask? The intention of Tony Ginnane and/or Simon Wincer seems to have been that the story took place somewhere in the US, but it’s some alternate dimension America where cars have right hand drive and televisions show the old Channel 2 test pattern; the bewildering array of accents (a number of which seem to have been post-synced) doesn’t help. That’s actually remarkably distracting, almost as much as the strangely ropey quality of the “magic” effects shots (just watch the visual quality of the image take a marked step down at those points), and rather gets in the way of involvement with the film, which I otherwise enjoyed. Everett de Roche updates the Rasputin story to… well, wherever the fucking thing is set, doing so in perhaps unnecessarily literal and schematic fashion (“Nicholas Rast”?); in other words, if you know your immediately pre-Revolutionary Russian history, there’s not a lot of real suspense involved, but it is kind of fun trying to work out the correspondences. Very good-looking production, too, apart from the shoddy effects shots, fairly well-played, and despite the relative lack of real narrative surprises I did like that it ultimately leaves Ras… sorry, Gregory Wolfe unexplained in rational terms—despite the almost convincing way Nick’s backers set up a dossier debunking him—he remains a properly supernatural figure when all is said and done, which makes the film a bit more than a standard political thriller. Problematic—I’m not sure I’ll ever lose my frustration over the indeterminate setting—but certainly enjoyable.

By this point we’re at the business end of the Ozploitation series, and also at an interesting point for “Ozploitation” itself, i.e. the post-Mad Max phase… and this bit of work reunited several key personnel from that film (watch for an uncredited, not to mention unshaven, Mel Gibson), most notably the good doctor himself as associate producer. The actual auteur, though, was Ian Barry, who we last saw as an editor on Stone, here making his feature debut; prior to this he’d made a short film (included on the DVD) as a demo reel for the feature he really wanted to make, but David Elfick convinced him it’d be easier to raise coin for the much more straight ahead suspense thriller he’d also written. And then the AFC cut about a third of the budget just before shooting started, which was neither the last nor arguably the worst thing to happen to the troubled production. At least part of the problem seems to have been Barry himself, whose visual sense seems to have been stronger than his storytelling sense; it’s a good enough story—nuclear waste facility contaminates “charming” bit of country NSW with plutonium leak, has to deal with radiation-affected scientist escaping to tell world rather than just letting them cover the affair up—but not always communicated in the best way. The thing eventually cost nearly what it was originally supposed to before the AFC slashed the funding, and the end result is perhaps unsure of whether it wants to be an exploitation film or a serious statement about the dangers of this sort of toxic waste; entertaining enough, to be sure, but hard not to think it might’ve been better had George Miller directed more than just second unit and car chases. Still, it wound up being a box office success both here and abroad, and the AFC would’ve probably been satisfied with that in the end… though it is noticeable Ian Barry apparently didn’t direct anything again for another six years after this.

I was baffled, while watching Lamond’s ABC of L&S, by the thought of who was actually watching films like that back in the day, and I find myself similarly puzzled by Felicity. For one thing, I can’t work out if Glory Annen’s a poor actress or if she’s just been poorly served by the script and/or dubbing (and if this is true of the rest of the cast), but that’s not all; I’m just puzzled by who was watching this back then. I think I’m just confused by the idea of the theatrical sex film, soft or hard, and the thought that people would actually congregate in large groups to watch them… and Lamond was making his films for drive-ins, so people were congregating not only in groups but in the open air in their cars. I don’t get it. I know home video wasn’t really an option here in 1979, but even so. Anyway—Lamond himself had gone up in the world a bit by the time of his first actual fiction feature (Australia After Dark‘s “satanists” notwithstanding), and in the interests of fairness it must be said it looks really good; Lamond apparently decided to make a film in Hong Kong while on holiday there or something, and the film does a nice job with that setting, the whole thing really does look lovely on the digital disc. Beyond that… um… well, I suppose it’s kind of interesting that a girl from a rural Catholic girls school in 1979 would’ve not only heard of The Story of O but actually had access to it (the Corgi film tie-in paperback)… I’m sorry, I know it’s meant to be fantasy to some extent, but that’s stretching it a bit for me. I don’t know, maybe I should’ve watched it with the sound turned off and just looked at it or something.

In an age where animal welfare in filmmaking is regulated to ensure they come to no harm, it’s hugely funny (to me if no one else) to see a film ending with a credit advising that the frog you see getting killed in the film was killed under a zoologist’s supervision. Interesting, too, to hear Richard Franklin trying again to pretend Fantasm didn’t happen in his DVD commentary, though Tony Ginnane casually drops the “F” word in his video interview. By comparison with Long Weekend, Patrick lives up much more to what the trailer promises. Franklin brought Ginnane exactly the sort of story the latter was looking to produce, i.e. a genre piece that’d sell well and wouldn’t necessarily play as an “Australian” film; the end result was, of course, an enormous hit outside of Australia (where it was a failure) whose geographical origins are arguably only really given away by the accents (and even those are disposed of in the hideous American dub, bits of which are featured on the DVD). Patrick is embodied by one Robert Thompson, and it’s a pretty remarkable performance considering he’s immobile on a bed for almost the entire film; Robert Helpmann is a surprisingly inspired bit of casting, too, as the weird doctor who runs the clinic Patrick is confined to. It’s pretty good on the whole, no real discernible weaknesses that I picked up on, but it’s possibly a bit long at 112 minutes, though the original version was even longer at 140 minutes before Franklin took scissors to it; as I’m sure I’ve said before, films like this really need to be as compact as they can to stop the thrills diffusing, and I’m not sure it wouldn’t have benefitted from a slight tightening up. Still, I can see why this is generally highly regarded, and I’m glad I waited for a good DVD edition to come out (though I can’t believe Umbrella couldn’t get a good PAL transfer of an Australian film and had to use an American NTSC version)…