“Cousin. Stuntman. Horrible actor, but hell of a nice guy”. This apt description of Grant Page, fifteen minutes into Stunt Rock (1978), nicely encapsulates the actor-stuntman’s screen persona. Page was a novel celebrity of sorts in the budding Australian film industry at the time, having served as stuntman or stunt coordinator on films like Sunday Too Far Away, Mad Dog Morgan, The Mango Tree, The Picture Show Man, Eliza Frazer, The Man from Hong Kong, and Deathcheaters. Page featured prominently in the latter two films, both directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith. He also headlined the series Dangerfreaks, about his exploits, and appeared on The Don Lane Show. Trenchard-Smith knew what he had in Page and built Stunt Rock around his star. Unfortunately, he also built it around a band called Sorcery.
There must have been something in the air in 1978: also released that year was Hal Needham’s Hooper, featuring Burt Reynolds as a Needham-esque stuntman to Adam West’s Reynolds-esque star. Page plays himself in Stunt Rock, which depicts his entreaties into Hollywood, where he works on a Charlie’s Angels-esque action series headlined by Dutch actress Monique Van de Ven (the star of Verhoeven’s Turkish Delight and Katie Tippel, playing herself and gamely performing her own base-jumping stunts) and romances a journalist (Margaret Gerard, who also co-starred in Deathcheaters). The stunt work on display—including jumps and falls from great heights, vehicle and fire stunts, and especially crawling along a tightrope between two apartment buildings—is impressive and cleanly photographed by DPs Helmen Ilmer and Robert Prime’s (under pseudonym Bob Carras). This work is complemented by clips from other Page films and of other Australian stuntmen at work, as well as silent film era stunts and scenes from newer titles like Gone in 60 Seconds (OG).
Stunt Rock is similar in aesthetic and premise not to Hooper but to Trenchard-Smith’s own The Man from Hong Kong and Deathcheaters. Like Hong Kong, the film sees a resourceful renegade transplanted to a foreign location, where he romances women and gets involved in hijinks, and like Deathcheaters, Page plays a broadly-drawn version of himself and the film is structured around his stunt set pieces. Of course, those films were propelled by thriller plots tying together said set pieces, featured engaging supporting performances—from George Lazenby, Hugh Keays-Byrne, and Roger Ward in Hong Kong and John Hargreaves in Deathcheaters—propping up their likeable but leaden lead, and unfolded in attractive Sydney locations. Stunt Rock is shaggier in plotting, shot in drabber LA locations (like another Australian production/mockumentary, Fantasm, two years earlier), and punctuated with musical performances by a rock group comprised of theatre kids, who Trenchard-Smith only saw perform on videotape prior to filming their numbers. At the risk of sounding like Rex Reed, I forwarded through a good portion of the pyrotechnic-laden songs (in my defence, I’d seen the film before).
While
ostensibly a monument to its star’s talents, Page is sufficiently self-effacing
and ropey as an actor that it never becomes an ego trip. For contrast, see Top
Gun: Maverick, in which Tom Cruise’s Maverick gets in trouble for doing
something amazing, is sent to flight school to teach other pilots to be as
amazing as he is, repeatedly demonstrates that he’s more amazing than they are,
and successfully leads them to complete an impossible aerial mission, with the
actor-producer doing all his own amazing aerial stunts.
Ben
[1] Later films Page served on include the Mad Max films, Patrick, Roadgames, The Odd Angry Shot, The Pirate Movie, The Lighthorsemen, Jackie Chan vehicle Mr Nice Guy, and The Tracker, in which he delivers a nicely tuned supporting performance. Other titles Page worked on that have been covered on Down Under Flix include Resistance, 33 Postcards, and Liquid Bridge.