Australia

Ever since he was a boy, Paul Morris (Paul Moder) has wanted to be a hitman like his hero The Snake (Frank Bren). There’s just one catch – he only wants to kill bad guys. Now married to Helen (Helen Hopkins) and with a young daughter to provide for, Paul is now struggling to succeed in his chosen career – unaware that his trusted partner George (Kevin Hopkins) is secretly a crazed pervert who wants to get Paul killed so he can marry Helen himself. Paul’s life is also complicated by his relationship with Matty (Carolyn Bock) a policewoman who has agreed not to arrest him in exchange for regular sex. Whatever setbacks he encounters, Paul remains optimistic, convinced that his career will take off if he can only score that ‘one big hit.’ With his dreams of scoring the big hit that will make his future secure Paul must negotiate personal entanglements and the rivalry of legendary hitman “The Snake” (Frank Bren) who also has his sights set on securing the bounty.Read More »

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A slickly made and occasionally creative action drama, of the thoughtful sort they seldom make anymore. The hero of Philip Noyce’s 1978 Australian film is a newsreel cameraman, a device that allows Noyce to cut between stock shots and new footage, black and white and color, and historical and personal events. The montage sometimes makes good drama and good sense, but at other points the intent is every bit as obscure as the Australian politicians the film constantly alludes to.Read More »

Filmed years after “At Uluru” (1978) in very different conditions, the film showcases the burnt landscape around a monolith in a land inhabited for millennia.
“As the camera moves gently from afar into the very heart of the monolith, the magic of the holiest site of the Aborigines unfolds in shimmering nuances of light.
Shot at different times of day, the close-up and panorama shots of this more than 500-million-year-old stone formation combine silence and acoustically altered birdsong to convey a feeling of timelessness into which a sense of loss is also inscribed. The somnambulistic moonrise in the great sky seems almost like an abstract painting and yet it is real. The areas of discolouration in the film material caused by problems in the developing process were deliberately left in the film as a metaphor for the looming threat to this natural environment through bushfires and tourism.Read More »

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On Queensland’s Gold Coast in the early 1980s, when a disgraced former cop, Michael Stacey writes a book exposing police corruption, does an investigation resulting in 2 murders, exposes a religious cult and watches the army begin a military coup.Read More »

The great unknown masterpiece of mid-century Australian cinema, Clay is unlike anything made in the country before or since. The story of the film is really the sad story of Mangiamele’s career; shown to acclaim at Cannes, no local distributor would show the film, so the director was forced to hire a cinema in Melbourne to screen it himself. There are many influences here, but to me it evokes New Wave cinema from Eastern Europe as much as anything else. Don’t expect great dialogue, or great acting, and there are profound technical issues (the poor sound synch is typical of Mangiamele’s work, but he never had any money for post-production, to the extent that his earlier feature Il Contratto exists only in silent form with no soundtrack at all).Read More »

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Back in the 80s, Roger Ebert derisively referred to slashers as “Dead Teenager Movies,” so the title Dead Kids feels like a nice thumb to the eye. Even if it isn’t, it’s still a fucking great title that tells you all you need to know: there be dead kids here (and of course, American distributors got squeamish and renamed it Strange Behavior). An Ozploitation flick by way of New Zealand, Dead Kids is a deceptive entry in the slasher cycle since it merely poses as a typical splatter film before setting off on its own tangents. Per usual, you can’t expect Australians to do anything straightforward. We love them for that, though.Read More »

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Nominally a supernatural thriller, Peter Weir’s third feature resonates with the director’s underlying fascination with the collision between the modern, rational world and the primordial mysteries of older belief systems. In The Last Wave, the keys to an enigmatic murder, as well as baffling disturbances in the weather, are gradually revealed to an Australian lawyer (Richard Chamberlain) within the shadowy, nomadic culture of aborigines living in and around Sydney who until now were presumed to be assimilated into its modern–and white–social fabric. Read More »

Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett reported the Vietnam War from the perspective of the North Vietnamese. For this he was reviled as a traitor and a communist in the Australian media. He had been the first journalist into Hiroshima after the atom bomb, and he covered wars in Vietnam, Laos and Kampuchea.Read More »

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Based on the Bathurst prison riots of 1974, Stir is a convincing account of a brutal jail system and almost unbelievable degree of sadism that infected the warders in their treatment of the prisoners there. Written by Bob Jewson, who was a minimum security inmate at the time, the script presents the prisoner’s point of view without bias but with a great sense of humanity creating well-drawn characters and situations that never fall into the hackneyed or melodramatic. Read More »