NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD (2008)

It can be difficult to create an all-encompassing documentary that looks at the history of cinema unless it’s on one very specific topic. How can you possibly cover everything that’s worthy of being covered? How can you convey what you want to convey when knowing you can’t possibly include everything that should be included?

Mark Hartley’s 90-minute documentary on Australian cinema, Not Quite Hollywood, finds a way. Split into three main sections — exploitation, horror, and action — Harley explores Australia’s movie making beginnings and the country’s efforts to at least get their movies into American theaters. Not Quite Hollywood excels not just as a respectable examination of Australian films and filmmakers, but also serves as a witness to the creation of the Australian aesthetic — a look and feel that would soon become known as “Ozploitation,” and which would aid filmmakers in transitioning from making films inspired by other people to establishing their own identity.

In the beginning, when filmmakers were focused on trashy sex pics, nearly soft-core porn, the influences of Roger Corman are almost tangible. Same goes for the horror phase, with obvious odes to Hitchcock, Spielberg, and H.G. Lewis. But once the doc transitions again to the action and adventure phase, much of which is vehicular in relation, you see filmmakers begin to step up and create their own works that would, in turn, inspire American filmmakers. George Miller, perhaps one of the few Australian directors to command the Hollywood box office (along with James Wan), most recently with Mad Max: Fury Road, is a notable exception of a director who, like John Carpenter or George Romero, started small with low budget productions and eventually changed the landscape of movie making.

Not Quite Hollywood is also often very funny, getting a lot of mileage from frequently cutting back to Australian film critic and full-time curmudgeon Bob Ellis for him to dryly voice his disapproval over certain titles, certain directors, or certain entire cinematic movements. Hartley also occasionally lets his camera linger on certain certain subjects whom other interviewees have suggested as having, er…interesting or combative personalities, in an effort to offer an inkling that maybe there was something to those claims. Inversely, stories about the utter insanity that Dennis Hopper engaged in during the shooting of Mad Dog Morgan, when compared to the interview portions with Hopper (who good-spiritedly appears) that present him as very calm, reflective, and absolutely honest about his past behavior, are equally amusing.

It’s no surprise that Quentin Tarantino turns up as a talking head, and probably gets more screen time than some of the actual Australian filmmakers whose films are being discussed, but the overly excited director helps to represent that next generation of international directors who were clearly inspired by Australian cinema. James Wan and Leigh Whannell also appear, with Whannell freely admitting that the scene in Mad Max where Mel Gibson offers a bad guy shackled to a flaming car a handsaw directly inspired one of the main concepts of their then-hit horror film Saw. (Not Quite Hollywood was produced in 2008.)

Even if you don’t have a particular interest in Australian cinema, you’d be wise to embrace Not Quite Hollywood anyway. Though the accents may be different and the environments more desert-ridden than cityscaped, the spirit of low budget filmmaking — and all the trials and tribulations that come with it — are universal.

WYRMWOOD: ROAD OF THE DEAD (2014)

Wyrmwood is exhausting, but not necessarily in a bad way. Though its own marketing is quick to declare it as a combination of Dawn of the Dead and Mad Max, what Wyrmwood seems to owe a lot to, in spite of its vehicular zombie carnage, is From Dusk Till Dawn, a film that was so excited to circumvent expectations that the sheer audacious spectacle of it all pushed its audience to sheer fatigue by the time the Geckos were regretting their pilgrimage to the Titty Twister.

Wyrmwood takes a more restrained approach in scope, as necessitated by its budget, but the frenetic and frantic camera work, the cuts, the quick zooms, the Greengrassness of its execution - it soon becomes an entire carnival of clowns burning with neon-colored fire screaming in your face. What that overextended image means is simply: after a while, you want to scream "enough!"

Thankfully, this in-your-face motif doesn't last through to the end of the first act, but then the film runs into a new problem: going from a hyperkinetic carnage-a-thon to a slower-paced and idiosyncratic walkabout. Jokes happen, sadistic doctors dance to disco - and this in a film where a father is forced to shoot his own daughter in the face with a nail gun. It's unexpected, and the decision to do so feels like trying to appeal to every facet of the zombie-loving audience: those who love goofball humor with their undead, and those who don't.

People like to debate the effectiveness of the zombies from the Romero era versus the post-28 Days Later/MTV generation version, and which of them are superior, and on and on. This debate is generally broken down into the ol' walking versus running ghouls. But what it should be broken down to is the approach to the story - in particular, how the zombies are presented, and what purpose they serve. You'll find that the separation of the old school versus the new school becomes increasingly blurred, and after a while it doesn't matter if the undead are shambling slowly after you or doing an all-out sprint. Soon the only question that will matter is this: are the zombies being used for a purpose, or a plot device? Is there a social message at hand beneath all the face eating, or are zombies in right now so let's open that killer werewolf script you have and do a term-find/replace from one monster to the other?

The biggest hurdle Wyrmwood has to overcome is how completely oversaturated the zombie sub-genre has become. To purposely use a bad pun, the zombie thing has been done to death, and except for the minuscule population who simply can't get enough, everyone else has taken two steps way back from the whole brain-eating affair. Because horror subsists on cyclical genre, the zombie thing is a phase that will soon work itself out and fade back into the ten-dollar budget camp, where filmmakers have no agenda beyond good intentions and a story that hinges on metaphors of cannibalism and consumption rather than because zombies are "in." The slasher craze came and went - twice - as did the "torture porn" phase, which was mercifully short-lived. Zombies, too, will one day fade back away into the dark, unexplored recesses of the genre, and high school teen girls (or their moms) will stuff their Daryl t-shirts into the Goodwill garbage bag and wonder just what it was they were thinking.

Wyrmwood doesn't have a whole heck of a lot to "say," and its tonal shift from dead seriousness to smart-talkin' ironic fun doesn't necessarily come off feeling natural. That, once again, a group of survivors encounter a threat even more dangerous than the growing zombie army - that of the military who have let the power go their heads (which has been done already in 28 Days Later and Day of the Dead before it) - isn't doing the film favors. Its involvement of the Mad Max angle (another Australian production) certainly has a lot of potential to inject new life into the increasingly boring zombie sub-genre, but not nearly enough is done with it to make Wyrmwood stand out from the pack. However, given its easy watchability factor, the solid performances, and admittedly excellent make-up and visual effects, a little bit of brainless entertainment never hurt anyone.