showbiz

Ozploitation meets The Burrowers

Posted on Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2008
by John Powell - Cineplex Entertainment

Not Quite Hollywood

A scene from Dead end Drive-In. (Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing)

Blasts, blood and breasts. Australian genre cinema of the seventies and eighties had plenty of those and then some. It was those much loved and hated exploitation cinema films that built an industry where Picnic at Hanging Rock, Mad Max and My Brilliant Career could be made and find global success.

Mark Hartley's documentary Not Quite Hollywood, screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, celebrates those unsung heroes who pushed the barriers in Australia and in doing so paved the way for future filmmakers. Narrated mostly by perhaps the most famous exploitation fan of them all: Quentin Tarantino. The film chronicles the birth of Australia’s film industry and the drive-in cinema that put the country on the map long before Crocodile Dundee ever put a shrimp on the barbie.

From the kung fu fury of The Man from Hong Kong to the apocalyptic mayhem of Mad Max, Hartley has amassed a collection of priceless clips and astute commentary from the likes of Stacey Keach, Jamie Lee Curtis, the unpredictable Dennis Hopper and a star-studded array of Australian filmmakers and critics.

Not Quite Hollywood

Mel Gibson in Mad Max. (Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing.)

Thanks to Hartley, the unsung Aussie movie mavericks can finally take their much deserved bows.

Stumbling in the footsteps of the daring Australians is American J.T. Petty and his ill-defined film The Burrowers playing during the Midnight Madness program at the Festival. I know what you are thinking and the film is not about really little people who survive day to day by borrowing items from bigger people. That was The Borrowers, folks. The Burrowers are ferocious four-legged underground predators from the Old West who have taken to dining on humans because all of the buffalo have been killed off by…You guessed it!...the stupid humans. So, it serves them right.

More like quivers than Tremors, the film meanders along like a three-legged blind horse with lingering shots of the Dakota Territory broken up by a few cool gunfights and creature attacks. Mr. Petty wrote some of the Splinter Cell games. That’s cool. The Burrowers is not.

The Burrowers

A victim is dragged off in 'The Burrowers'.

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