Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild Untold Story of Ozploitation

Directed by Mark Hartley

(R)

***

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A light look at Australia’s most notorious films

Mark Hartley’s “rollicking romp” of a debut is a hoot, said Megan Lehmann in The Hollywood Reporter. Not Quite Hollywood takes a look back at Australia’s “ambitious, often atrocious” film genre known as “Ozploitation.” In 1971, Australia’s government relaxed its stringent censorship rules, setting off an explosion in independent—often amateur—filmmaking that lasted through the 1980s. Hartley’s documentary “commandeers the gung-ho spirit that fueled the guilty-pleasure schlock” of that era. He crams more than 80 grindhouse films into “100 consistently hilarious and jaw-dropping minutes,” said Lou Lumenick in the New York Post. They run the gamut from ridiculous horror films to soft- and hard-core porn to “car chase movies that make The Fast and the Furious look positively lame.” This best-of-the-worst montage can feel like an “extended DVD feature,” but you’re laughing too hard to care. It’s pure trash, said Scott Foundas in The Village Voice. But for nearly two rip-roaring hours, Hartley “returns us to a time when the price of admission was cheap and the thrills even cheaper.”