In Film Australia - all about Australian films

Writer/director Samuel Genocchio’s dark and abstruse thriller Bad Bush is set in a remote farmhouse, where a young woman and her newborn baby spend a night alone with a drug-crazed dope grower. The film is a creepy cat-and-mouse story intelligently handled and resourcefully shot, squeezing every penny out of a total budget of $220,000 (including [...]

Megan Spencer is a distinguished film personality in Australia and a rare example of a film aficionado who has worked professionally both as a reviewer and a filmmaker. Her critiquing CV includes stints for ABCs JJJ and SBS’s The Movie Show, and her films include documentaries Love struck: Wrestling’s #1 Fan and Strange Hungers: Mistress [...]

Eric Bana has always seemed like a decent kind of bloke: straight up, down to earth, relatively uncorrupted by the spoils of Hollywood success. That perception is unlikely to change as a result of his directorial debut, Love the Beast, despite the undeniable vanity associated with making a documentary about his favourite toy – a [...]

In its devotion to conjuring a wildly anomalistic atmosphere comprising layers upon layers of bizarre visual concoctions, The Eternity Man comes on hard and fast, with barely ten intangible minutes passing before director Julien Temple has introduced the audience to a long list of freaky-deaky things: an obese pig, a maniacal dwarf, bellowing prostitutes, bondage [...]

The infamy and opprobrium associated with director Brian Trenchard-Smith’s 1982 horror/action/adventure hybrid Turkey Shoot has only grown over the years, the film officially endorsed as Aussie cult crème de la crème in Mark Hartley’s 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood.

Shooting on a schmick camera with pristine lighting and a high-end production crew probably wasn’t an option on the table for Mark Butcher, cash-strapped director of Sticky Carpet, but more saliently a clean and pristine film wouldn’t have made a conducive fit for the subject Butcher documents in extensive, near exhaustive detail: the underground rock [...]

Debut director David Field illustrates with a confronting lack of subtlety how petty schoolyard grievances can escalate into full-blown tragedy in The Combination, a provocative drama about bad decisions, misspent youth and racial tensions between young Lebanese and Caucasian Australians in Sydney.

The strength of every documentary, so the argument goes, ultimately lies with its subject. Richard, a no frills 51-minute film about a flamboyant toy collector in the Sydney suburb of Petersham, is the perfect test ground on which this contention can be tried and explored.