Movie Review - Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2009)

Directed by Mark Hartley

As the poster to the right correctly states, if you wanna see boobs and pubes, this is the movie for you. The boob and pube ratio is, by far, the highest per minute of any film I've seen this year. That being said, this documentary detailing the first twenty years or so of Australian cinema was incredibly interesting and I certainly learned something about an aspect of film that I knew nothing about.

Apparently in the early 1960s, the Australian movie industry was nonexistent -- one of the few "modernized" countries that failed to embrace the art form. With the help of some tax breaks created by the government, some folks decided to take a stab at making movies and the results were sex romps, cheesy horror flicks, and biker gang films. While not a single movie presented in this documentary looked good, they all looked hilarious and I'm certainly tempted to rent a few.

Whether it be the sex pic where the lady is lying next to a five-foot purple penis, or the horror flick where a woman becomes a marsupial and a rat-like creature comes out of a pouch in her stomach, or the incredibly cool scene in a biker flick where a guy lights himself on fire and jumps off an eighty-foot cliff, all of these movies provided a pretty neat glimpse into this crazy Australian culture (however "true" it was to the "real" Australia) of the sixties and seventies.

The film moves along pretty darn quickly and the anecdotes told in first-hand accounts by the participants of the flicks were interesting. True, Quentin Tarantino makes an appearance (multiple times, actually) and openly admits to copying things for his movies, but, I even liked him in this. He's a film geek, and, to a certain extent (even though I wish he would be a little more independently-minded in his filmmaking process), I've got to respect that about him. He certainly knows about cheesy cinema and he openly loves it.

So, in the end, if you're looking for a fun documentary where you'll learn about the fact that they actually shot real bullets at actors while making these movies, or that Dennis Hopper was a complete drug-addled nut in the 70s (big surprise), or that when making fake vomit, you need to mix in lemonade for that extra added fizz, Not Quite Hollywood is for you.

I had a fun time and certainly recommend this if you're even the slightest bit interested in exploring a typically unexplored genre of film.

The RyMickey Rating: B+