Wake in Fright: What, You Don’t Love the Yabba?

The good citizens of Bundanyabba (“The Yabba,” like The Bronx or The Hague) will be happy to buy a drink for any visitor.  It is a matter of civic pride.  However, The Yabba seems to amplify the worst in human nature throughout Ted Kotcheff’s long lost grindhouse for the art-house Wake in Fright (trailer here), which opens in all its restored glory this Friday at Film Forum.

John Grant’s heart would not be in teaching, even if he were posted to a school in Sydney.  Unfortunately, he is financially bound to the outback during his term of service.  With the semester break starting, he will finally be able to visit his attractive girlfriend in  the city.  He just has one night to kill in the Yabba before continuing on his way.  Oh, but there will be complications.

After losing his term’s pay in a glorified game of heads-or-tails, Grant falls in with a gang of lowlifes led by the town’s unapologetically boozy doctor, Tydon.  A whole lot of alcohol will quickly hasten Grant’s slide into the dark side.  At least, he is not a kangaroo.  When Grant’s dubious new mates set out on a hunting trip, the carnage is famously disturbing.

Not exactly a thriller or a horror film, Wake is a brutally pessimistic morality play.  In the Yabba, the veneer of civilization is rather chipped and faded.  An intellectual like Grant ought to be a model of man’s progressive perfectability, but Doc Tydon and his running mates reduce him to his nasty, brutish core in a matter of days.  Yet, it is never clear whether the Yabba yobs are really out to break him down or if he is just a puppet of fate.

Whether it is the blinding sun, the hallucinatory kangaroo hunt, or the stone cold humiliations meted down on Grant, Kotcheff maintains a visceral intensity throughout Wake, controlling the vibe like a master puppeteer and framing some powerful visuals.  One of only two films to be twice selected for Cannes, it makes a convincing argument Kotcheff might just be the world’s most underappreciated auteur.  Indeed, his oeuvre also includes Rambo: First Blood, Uncommon Valor, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, and Weekend at Bernies, which is what we call a career in mi casa.

The late Gary Bond, who would eventually become an Andrew Lloyd Webber regular on the West End, sure looks like a tool who needs to be taken down a peg or two.  Still, he takes his character to some pretty scary depths.  Donald Pleasance plays his doctor-tormentor.  That is so perfect, there is no need to explain further.  In his last screen appearance, Chips Rafferty also adds further authentic flavor as Jock Crawford, the ostensibly welcoming local peace officer.

It is important to bear in mind no ‘roos were hurt for the sake of Wake.  Kotcheff just tagged along with a regularly scheduled commercial hunting outing.  The results stand in sharp contradiction to the Paul “Shrimp on the Barbie” Hogan image assiduously crafted by the tourism bureau.  Of course, for fans of Ozploitation the restored Wake is a can’t miss release.  A surprisingly challenging work, Wake is recommended for all patrons of cult cinema when it opens this Friday (10/5) at New York’s Film Forum, with Kotcheff on hand to receive his overdue ovation at the 7:30 screening.

Ozploitation: Not Quite Hollywood

There was a time when scrappy Australian filmmakers churned out low budget films laden with sex, violence, projectile vomiting, and some occasional cruelty to animals—basically just good, clean Aussie fun. The 1970’s and early 1980’s were truly the golden era of Ozploitation, which finally gets its Chuck Workmanlike due in Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood (“red band” trailer here), opening this Friday in New York.

Hartley essentially divides his survey into four parts: soft-core skin flicks, gory horror films, kung fu and biker actioners, and Ozploitation’s tragic late 80’s descent into cheese, eventually followed by its recent retro Renaissance. Each part has plenty of guilty pleasures to offer, accompanied by insightful commentary by the responsible actors and filmmakers, plus fanboy Quentin Tarantino.

As one might expect, NQH contains plenty of scenes inappropriate for young viewers. Given his subject matter, Hartley takes advantage of the opportunity to show pretty much everything. However, he definitely makes an intriguing case for many of the genre’s high octane films. For instance, George Lazenby getting his one-and-done James Bond butt thoroughly kicked and then burnt to a crisp in Brian Trenchard-Smith’s The Man from Hong Kong just looks like all kinds of awesome. Conversely, many of the grade-Z films Tarantino rhapsodizes over look totally lame, yet the gleeful barrage of bizarre images make NQH relentlessly entertaining.

Serious film scholars can take something out of NQH as well. After all, prestigious filmmakers, like Fred Schepisi (director of Six Degrees of Separation) and John Seale (Academy Award winning cinematographer of The English Patient) started out in the Ozploitation trenches before moving on to proper cinema, but still have fond words for the genre. Indeed, Hartley seemed to have access to just about every surviving Ozploitation veteran, yet his funniest talking head segments come courtesy of a delightfully contrarian Australian writer perfectly willing to unequivocally state on camera that these films are complete rubbish and most of the filmmakers who made them are thoroughly rotten human beings. Let’s hear it for equal time.

Those mere mortals who do not know Hurricane Smith from Mad Dog Morgan might still be interested in the Hollywood stars who turn up to discuss their Ozploitation sojourns, including Jaime Lee Curtis, Stacy Keach, and Dennis Hopper. The film’s only drawback is the omnipresence of Tarantino. Certainly, as the foremost Ozploitation lover, his participation makes sense, but after the first half-hour his pseudo-geeky hipster schtick grows tiresome.

NQH is a breezy, enjoyable documentary made with genuine affection for a class of films that have not gotten much critical love. It also has cool visual style inspired by its drive-in-grindhouse roots. Those who are easily offended should not even think about it. However, if your idea of a good time at the movies involves a giant razorback hog chasing teenagers across the outback, NQH will be your version of That’s Entertainment. Heartily recommended with that major caveat, NQH opens this Friday in New York at the Village East Cinema.