There are exploitation films and then there are exploitation films. And the Australian film industry in the 1970s had a whole belly full of these running sores. There were, of course, the international art house hits like Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, and My Brilliant Career. But buried beneath these teacup exercises in decorum was genre programming where sensation was played out to the ultimate degree with firehose blood sprays, galumphing vaginas, suicidal stunts, and careening car crackups.

In Mark Hartley's Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! these termite terrors finally get their due. Hartley offers a speedball injection directly into the aorta, showcasing these fast, cheap, and out of control aneurystic explosions.

Hartley had the extraordinary advantage when mounting this tribute to Ozploitation to be able to extract comments from anyone who had anything to do with these genre films -- from the legions of Australian stars, directors, and producers of the films and down-on-their-luck American actors who signed on for the money and went along for the ride to the Australian film critics, who more than two decades after the glory years still want the films and the filmmakers to burn in hell.

Hartley energizes the brew with rocket fuel paroxysms displaying clips of the greatest, the most disgusting, and the most vile moments from these films, and he keeps the joint rocking with a continuous, pulsating, and petulant music track. After a while the film becomes shrill and numbing and blood may even flow from your eyes. Not Quite Hollywood may be quite irritating but at least it is never less than intense and enervating.

Hartley touches on all the major trends in this gag-worthy form of cinema. There are the gross-out sex comedies initiated by The Naked Bunyip, Alvin Purple, and The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (the brainchild of Barry Humphries, later to gain immortality as Dame Edna); the blood feast gore of the low rent cut-'em-ups, beginning with Patrick, Harlequin, and Roadgames (two of which were helmed by Hitchcock acolyte Richard Franklin, who later on fulfilled his destiny by directing Psycho II); and the madhouse crack-up, gas-guzzling action films like Stone, Turkey Shoot, and Mad Max (films described by the caffeinated Renfield of American cinema, Quentin Tarantino, as films where "there were women to rape and guys to beat up").

Not Quite Hollywood is high octane fun that casts a spotlight on the weird and the wonderful world of Australian exploitation films. This is junk food entertainment of a high order. There isn't much depth to it, but then what better tribute can a documentary on a film movement offer than, after you see it and get your heart rate back to normal, you attempt to crash Netflix by lining up all of these films in your queue. Alas, one suspects that their best moments may be in Hartley's samplings here than in the film themselves.

The DVD includes a commentary track, deleted scenes, more interviews, and various other ephemera.



Needs more sparks.