In Film Australia - all about Australian films

There are really only two things that exist in Australia that are truly terrifying: natural environment and colonial history. In an effort to explore our harsh national topography and its even darker psychogeographical counterpart, writer/director Bill Bennett turns to the traditional tropes of genre filmmaking, resulting in the visually stunning, thematically poignant - though narratively [...]

Welcome to the Roget Clinic, a place which attracts certain types including “lesbians, nymphomaniacs, enema specialists, zoophiliacs, necrophiliacs, paedophiliac, scopophiliacs, exhibitionists and voyeurs”, and that’s just the staff! Inside the private Melbourne clinic resides a variety of patients in various psychological states. Patrick (Robert Thompson) is one of these patients, spending his days in the [...]

Bruce Beresford’s memorable 1976 film has a reputation of bawdiness and vulgarity mixed with explicit nudity that well and truly precedes it. However, few of these seedy, politically incorrect associations have any basis in truth - at least not by modern standards.

According to Jean-Luc Godard, “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl”, a mantra that well served the cinematic output which gave rise to psychoanalytic spectatorship theory in the 1960s and 1970s. But in 1997 it seems anomalous coming from Bill Bennett’s ‘couple on the run’ feature, Kiss or Kill. An [...]

The opening shot of The Man From Hong Kong is quite unforgettable. The tension slowly builds as a busload of tourists pull up at Uluru and one appears to do a drug deal, the drugs having been hidden in the forever inconspicuous pale-blue Conn Air Australia luggage bags. The awaiting police quickly intercept. What ensues [...]

Australian youths of the 1980s were apparently just as likely to fall prey to the same foolish distractions as those of today if John Clark’s mostly unintentionally hilarious Running on Empty is any indication. This was only ever going to be a cult film, with its undernourished treatment of hotted-up cars, schoolboy vendettas, abnormally high [...]

There is a certain type of crassness that is inherently two things: endearing and Australian. But of course there is another kind of crassness that forgoes endearing and situates itself as merely Australian. Welcome to Woop Woop (1997) is a film most commonly condemned as the latter. But just because it’s not endearing doesn’t definitively [...]

I first saw Harlequin a few years ago when I purchased the Ozploitation, Volume 1 DVD. It confused me then and, having sat down to watch it again recently, still continues to do so.