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Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation (18)

Reviewed,Robert Hanks
Friday 13 March 2009 01:00 GMT
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While critics here and in America were busy admiring Australia's new wave of art-house cinema in the Seventies – Picnic at Hanging Rock, My Brilliant Career – another, more vivid and lucrative wave of films was sneaking in through the back door: sex comedies, slasher films, sub-Mad Max post-apocalypse thrillers were dominating American drive-ins (the young Quentin Tarantino was a scholar of the phenomenon).

Mark Hartley's documentary, the one essential film of the week, is not just informative and very funny, but also gets at an important general point – the extent to which film, however artistically pure its ambitions, is parasitic on the tits-and-gore industry for the money and the energy it needs.

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