Fantastic Fest 2008

Part Of the Fantastic Fest "Not Quite Hollywood" Ozsploitation Retrospective. Seriously, Australia seems like a cool place to live. Everybody seems pretty cool. There are beautiful beaches. Outlaw culture is honored and respected. There's one huge downside though, everything that walks, swims or crawls can kill you within 8 seconds. The ocean is full of Great White Sharks, the venomous snake population is tops in the world, there are all kinds of creatures that taxonomists have never been able to get close enough to to even slap a Latin name on. Most disturbingly, there are giant crocodiles the size of eighteen-wheelers roaming the marshlands. Or so the makers of DARK AGE would have you believe. Fortunately, the film is so boomingly well directed, acted and shot you'll be willing to believe just about anything. Not only is the giant crocodile at the center of this film hundreds of years old, he is venerated by the Aboriginal Australians as a sacred spirit. Enter the great Aussie actor John Jarratt (WOLF CREEK) as a ranger assigned to kill the croc after it ingests some poachers. Instead of killing the beast, he makes plans to capture and relocate it - but the whole plan is jeopardized by the most incredibly scuzzy outback reptile hunters imaginable. Their one-armed leader lost an arm to the crocodile and takes it all pretty personally. With David Gulpilil and Burnam Burnam as the Aborigines who join up with the ranger and his lady against the bad guys. Fantastic, highly recommended. (Lars) Special thanks to Antony I. Ginnane and Quentin Tarantino for making this screening possible. This film is sponsored by Foster’s.

Not content to just earn the title of Most Important Action Film in Australian History, MAD MAX is flat-out responsible for kick-starting an entire unstoppable genre of pedal-to-the-metal mayhem! Following its release, celluloid documentations of a near-future world gone wild have appeared in countless languages, starring hundreds of international actors and cluttering video shelves with gasoline-hungry sunburnt desert warriors. Yet despite many top-notch entries during the exponential growth of the nuclear annihilation entertainment industry, it goes without saying that George Miller's flagship contribution remains unmatched. Mel Gibson is 'Mad' Max Rockatansky, a law-keeping family man in a pre-post-apocalyptic world that dangles mere inches above total societal implosion. Marauding criminals roam the Earth and live beyond rule, their numbers increasing as the police exhaust all their means to keep the inevitable at bay. But when a vicious maniac and his gang snuff out the few people Max cares for, he's transformed into an unstoppable force of raw, burning retribution, and the film becomes a whiplash-inducing catalogue of two-fisted, blue-collar, auto/human damage. Though shot on a modest budget, this 40-million horsepower beast skimps on nothing but social conscience, as everyone from bikers to babies are targeted for full-scale, wholesale slaughter. MAD MAX was originally released in the US in de-Aussified dubbed form, but we're pleased to present a recently-struck 35mm print with the original audio track, complete with all the muttered colloquialisms and down-under swearing you desire. So follow the red asphalt to the Alamo for total mechanized vengeance in the most crucial, influential and shockingly perfect exploitation masterpiece to ever tear open the Australian highway! (Zack Carlson) (NOTE: At both MAD MAX and ROAD WARRIOR free outdoor screenings, in addition to the fun on screen, Chef John Bullington will be serving up classic Australian meat pies, shrimp on the barby and there will be plenty of giant-sized ice-cold Foster's to wash'em down with. Also, come prepared, we're having a Vegemite sandwich eating contest before the film.)

Part Of the Fantastic Fest "Not Quite Hollywood" Ozsploitation Retrospective. From now on whenever anyone asks me what the most berserk orgy of action and violence ever placed on film is I'll be honor-bound to answer THE MAN FROM HONG KONG. If a car crashes and explodes in this film (and it will, don't worry) you'd better believe it will explode with 5,000 megatons of TNT power. When our special guest Brian Trenchard-Smith was filming this movie in Australia he got complaints from Soviet Cosmonauts in space who said it kept them awake at night. With 75 car chases, 17 throat-ripping death fights, 437 burning-man scenes and one dopey hang-glider this is truly a memorable exercise in pedal to the metal excitement. And director Brian Trenchard-Smith, who not only directed the film but plays a pornishly-bedecked henchman, will be here in person to explain how and why. Stars Jimmy Wang Yu as the "tough cop who learned every trick in the book and then threw the book away" and erstwhile James Bond seatwarmer George Lazenby as a dandyish crime boss with a bulletproof mustache. Stunts by the madman from dingo-land Grant Page, who appears desperate to end it all in a progressively greater and greater aggregation of death-defiance. (Lars) With director Brian Trenchard-Smith live in person. Rare 35mm print courtesy of The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. This film is sponsored by Foster’s. This film is endorsed by Headquarters 10!

Brief Summary: Probably the biggest concentration of explosions, nudity and blood at Fantastic Fest this year. A documentary that traces the secret and not so secret history of ozploitation. Full Description: "Fascinating and hugely entertaining...Brilliant stuff." - Edgar Wright Finally, the definitive story of the go-for-broke, fuck-it-all Aussie renaissance of the '70s and '80s. The national character of Australia is marked by a certain raucous non-conformity, and the country's fast and furious exploitation film output during this golden age is notable for its extreme audacity - rudeness even. As exiled subjects of the British Empire they might have been expected to copy the staid, overly mannered films of their ancestral homeland but hell no, their films are loaded with more boobs, reckless car chases, explosions and killer fauna than anyone's. They're cheap, filthy, loud and proud. And like a cool rain in the middle of the outback, this very welcome and unexpected doc gives you the "Easy Riders Raging Bulls" style lowdown on all the best ozploitation films you've never seen, including unheralded masterpieces like THE LONG WEEKEND and ROAD GAMES, exercises in stylistic excess like RAZORBACK and NEXT OF KIN, downright full-blooded smut like THE NAKED BUNYIP and STORK, bloody horrors like NIGHT OF FEAR and THIRST and the spectacular action mayhem of Brian Trenchard-Smith, whose films MAN FROM HONG KONG and TURKEY SHOOT break off the violence knob altogether. Fans of genre cinema will be scribbling notes furiously to keep up with the lightning fast pace of NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD. In addition to the astonishing assortment of clips from the movies themselves, this film features dozens of interviews with Australian luminaries and imported American talent like Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis. Megafan Quentin Tarantino provides insightful commentary and characteristic enthusiasm throughout, as do directors James Wan (SAW) and Greg McLean (WOLF CREEK). (Lars Nilsen) Check out the Australian Not Quite Hollywood official site for tons of info and a mountain of jaw-dropping Ozploitation trailers. This film is sponsored by Foster’s. Read Edgar Wright's nifty blog post about NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD. Director Mark Hartley will attend these screenings and answer audience questions afterward.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION: An enormous, thundering wild boar lays waste to the Australian outback in this bizarre and unexpectedly effective man VS. beast showdown. FULL DESCRIPTION: Impossibly huge animals are an integral component of cinema. Since 1933’s KING KONG, hyperactive pituitary glands have inflated nearly all of nature’s children, from the enormous sheepcreature of GODMONSTER OF INDIAN FLATS to the towering interstellar chicken of THE X FROM OUTER SPACE. Even the uncharted wilds of Australia have submitted their entries to the Halls of Gargantuanism, here in the form of a baby-eatin’ multi-ton porcine powerhouse that rampages out of the blackened desert to destroy everything in its path. I saw the “Biggest Pig in the World” at the 2006 Iowa State Fair and it had nothin’ on this snubnosed 30-foot wreckage machine, which seems content to destroy everything on earth until it’s the only living thing left standing. Grip those armrests tight as a vengeful grandpa, two rural new wave oil drillers and an ineffective schlub attempt to take down this grunting, red-eyed, hate-fueled embodiment of utter annihilation. Director Mulchay would go on to helm the first two films in the unexpectedly successful HIGHLANDER series, but this stripped-down tale of biology gone awry trades in the gloss and nobility of those features for a two-fisted primal style so palpable that you can almost smell the bloodsoaked soil. (Zack Carlson) This film is sponsored by Foster’s.

Brief Description: Sequel to MAD MAX puts the pedal to the metal, then both pedal and metal alike explode in a death-shower of indescribable awesomeness. (Lars) Full Description: While it's sometimes depressing to realize that civilization is crumbling all around us, and that the combination of global warming and energy-based geopolitical strife will likely cause the destruction of the social order as we know it in a dozen or so years, it's also comforting to watch THE ROAD WARRIOR and realize how fucking cool it's going to look. Seriously, Mel Gibson as Mad Max runs into a spot of trouble here and there but his car kicks a thousand tons of ass. The movie is directed with so much skill and a serious movie buff's aptitude for the exact, perfect photographic angle or cutaway shot that it transcends the flat ugliness of the outback terrain and makes it a primal battleground for what's left of Good vs. rampaging, triumphant Evil. THE ROAD WARRIOR has a bit more Hollywood in in than MAD MAX but the conflict is fantastic. Lord Humungous and his triple-ugly crew of leather-punk shit starters are hall of fame bad guys and they enforce their own brand of social Darwinism with a gnarly mailed fist. It's up to Mad Max to be the de facto justice system in the midst of a war between the gasoline crazed thugs and the perpetually oppressed good guys, who just want to raise their awesome feral children and fly their super-incredible autogyros. It's a film that has contributed whole volumes to the visual and aural language of film-making. Directed by George Miller at his Spielbergian peak. The photography, editing, stunt-work, art-direction and costume design are all divinely inspired, as if a force from beyond wanted to warn us about becoming too reliant on petroleum-based fuels. We're ready to listen now. (Lars Nilsen) (NOTE: At both MAD MAX and ROAD WARRIOR free outdoor screenings, in addition to the fun onscreen, Chef John Bullington will be serving up classic Australian meat pies, shrimp on the barby and there will be plenty of giant-sized ice-cold Foster's to wash'em down with. Also, come prepared, we're having a Vegemite sandwich eating contest before the film.) This film is sponsored by Foster’s.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION: In a post-apocalyptic world gone wild, a handful of prison camp inmates must run for their life while being hunted for sport! FULL DESCRIPTION: I don’t want to alarm anyone, but the year 2000 is going to be a real rough ride. After we face a worldwide nuclear holocaust, we’ll be herded into militaristic re-education camps and picked off like animals by sadistic upper-crust pleasure hunters. Fortunately we’ll have fellow prisoners like Paul (Steve Railsback of THE STUNT MAN and LIFEFORCE), a ready-to-rumble “deviant” who refuses to stand quietly by as mankind’s future hits the chopping block. This hyper-adrenalized World War III-tinted variation on “The Most Dangerous Game” is a tense, gritty mass of explosive fury, co-starring ROMEO & JULIET’s Olivia Hussey and slick-headed Aussie heavy Roger Ward (MAD MAX) as the camp’s vicious Chief Guard. This is Aussie action cinema at a bold new level, as exploitation wizard Trenchard-Smith (in attendance, no less!) stirs up an unbelievable cocktail of celluloid dynamite that combines mutants, machismo, misogyny, misanthropy and a dazzling, bullet-ridden array of violence violence VIOLENCE!!! (Zack Carlson) With director Brian Trenchard-Smith live in person. Rare 35mm print courtesy Antony I. Ginnane. This film is sponsored by Foster’s.