A young schoolteacher tries to escape small-town Australia and reach Sydney…but gets waylayed in the darkest possible way. This is an amazing examination of small-town madness, the unspoken insanity of such a life and the brutality and destruction undertaken by men.It's also an amazing portrayal of cabin fever being caused by huge open spaces. The …
Continue reading Marsupial March- 31 Days of Aussie Movies- Day 3- Wake In Fright (1971)
George Miller's Mad Max is set in a future in which lawlessness is abundant. Max (Mel Gibson) is a young cop battling with a motorcycle gang who are bringing chaos to whomever they cross paths with. There's lots to like about Mad Max. Miller's comic book dystopic vision of the future, the stylisation not being …
Continue reading Marsupial March- 31 Days of Aussie Movies- Day 2- Mad Max (1979)
I first learnt of this film when it was marketed as The Day After Halloween, a sequel to John Carpenter’s classic. It isn’t, but it’s still a really interesting movie. Angela (played by Prisoner Cell Block H’s brilliant Sigrid Thornton) is persuaded to ditch her low-paid hairdressing job and enter the world of modelling. Nude modelling. This …
Continue reading Marsupial March- 31 Days of Aussie Movies- Day 1- Snapshot (1979)
A runner, Laura, literally drops dead after winning a 200-meter race. Her sister, who is in the Navy, comes to town for the graduation ceremony in which her sister will be honoured. A killer then starts bumping off Laura's teammates. But who is this murderer and what is their motive? I still can't believe that …
When the big screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage extravaganza Cats was released in 2019, it garnered the wrong kind of attention. It was reviewed as if it was the celluloid equivalent of cholera and easily the worst film of the year (some critics even said it was the worst film of the decade). …
This 1988 Umberto Lenzi film concerns a young girl, Henrietta who is discovered by her father after she has murdered the family cat with a pair of scissors (!) He places her in the basement as a punishment. Whilst she is there with only her clown doll to keep her company, she hears a mysterious …
Growing up, one of my favourite film books was Movies of the Seventies, edited by David Thompson. One film it highlighted was Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout from 1971. The stills from the film looked absolutely stunning, with the plot synopsis fully whetting my appetite. I then read in the excellent and much missed Premiere magazine that …
Continue reading Meathook Cinema Hall of Fame- Walkabout (1971)
Mabel Longhetti is married to Nick and they have three children. Her husband is getting increasingly worried by her seemingly wayward behaviour. This is demonstrated in the film by a couple of incidents. Early on we see her go to a bar and pick up a man after her husband is waylaid at work. The …
1983's Silkwood concerns Karen Silkwood, a plucky trade unionist who works at Kerr-McGee nuclear facility making fuel rods for nuclear reactors. Shes concerned by managers falsifying safety reports, cutting corners and retouching photographs of fuel rods to hide shoddy work and starts to campaign for these concerns to be rectified for the people who work …
Continue reading Meathook Cinema Hall of Fame- Silkwood (1983)
I remember back in the day being shown Boat Trip by a housemate who was also gay. He said that it was a hilarious movie with almost every character being homosexual. I watched the film all the way through out of politeness (something that wouldn't happen now) and thought it was the direct opposite of …
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