Down Under Flix

  After revisiting Stunt Rock , I was inspired to rewatch director Brian Trenchard-Smith and actor-stuntman Grant Page’s previous collaboration, Deathcheaters (1976). Page and John Hargreaves portray Rodney and Steve, two Vietnam War veterans who befriend each other in combat and on discharge become stuntmen in the entertainment industry. Recognizing their very particular set of skills, they are approached by intelligence bureaucrat Mr. Culpepper (an elegantly and humorously aloof Noel Ferrier) to infiltrate and obtain secret documents from an island fortress.      Stunt Rock was a hangout movie punctuated by stunts and suspect musical numbers. Although more of a traditional actioner, Deathcheaters has some of the same hangout vibe, and I found myself charmed by the dinkiness and humour of its oddly drawn espionage world and the onscreen bromance—decades before it became popular parlance—between Page and Hargreaves. My admiration for Hargreaves is well-documented , ...

  “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 ...

  I’m taking an elastic approach this week, focusing not on an Australian film or international work by an Australian filmmaker, but two films showcasing cinematography by an Australian DP, the great Dean Semler. My admiration for Semler is well-documented on this site (see, for example, my recent review of Razorback and older review of Firestorm ). I love the challenges Semler has embraced as a DP, ranging from shooting epic vehicular chases through the outback ( The Road Warrior ) to epic buffalo hunts on the frontier ( Dances with Wolves ) to thrillers and sci-fi adventure set largely on water and floating sets ( Dead Calm , Waterworld ) to Mayan action adventure on digital ( Apocalypto ) to a thriller centred on a paraplegic lead ( The Bone Collector ) to equestrian action ( The Lighthorsemen , Secretariat ) to multiple Eddie Murphies ( Nutty Professor II: The Klumps ). I love that over his career Semler’s helped defined the aesthetic behind several genres, including the contem...

  HBO’s impact on television as trendsetter, tastemaker, and gamechanger is obvious . If evidence is needed, look no further than the fact that I’m largely indifferent to television and averse to streaming subscriptions, yet have somehow absorbed in my lifetime one season apiece of Girls , Rome , Boardwalk Empire , Carnivale , The Newsroom , Eastbound and Down , and The Leftovers , two seasons apiece of The Wire , Extras , and True Blood , three seasons of Deadwood , four of Silicon Valley , eight of Game of Thrones , The Young and New Pope , the pilot of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency , Eddie Murphy's Delirious , Angels in America , and a smattering of episodes of Tracey Takes On , Sex and the City , Da Ali G Show , and Bored to Death . I don’t list the above to boast—truth be told, I’d be fine without the lot of them, bar Delirious , Angels , and Anthony Minghella’s lovely Detective Agency pilot—though I’ll concede listing one’s viewing is a very Harry Knowles thing to do. Ra...

“For eight months at Tobruk in 1941, fifteen thousand Australians and eight thousand British and Indian troops held a German army seven times their number and in seven times their armour. The Germans, understanding machines, but not these men, flung an insult to them in a name  —  'The Rats of Tobruk'. This insult they carried on their bayonets right into the ranks of the oncoming German hordes. It has become one of the finest epitaphs of the war. To these men who could never be driven from their firing posts before Rommel, we pay homage”. This text and narration open The Rats of Tobruk (1944) , and the film that follows focuses on three of those rats stationed in the Libyan port city under siege: Peter Linton (Peter Finch), a British writer; Bluey Donkin (Grant Taylor), a cattle drover; and Milo Trent (Chips Rafferty), a drover and dingo hunter.   In the Wake of the Bounty , released in 1933, was the first Charles Chauvel film discussed on Down Under Flix a...

Beth Winters (Judy Morris), a resourceful and ambitious American journalist, travels to Australia to investigate kangaroos being killed for pet food in a small outback town. The perpetrators, Dicko (David Argue) and Benny (Chris Haywood), pursue Beth with intent to harm, but are scared away by a monstrous wild boar who finishes the job. Beth’s boring husband Carl (Gregory Harrison) travels down under to investigate her disappearance, where he encounters Dicko and Benny, the monstrous boar, and the tragic Jake Cullen (Bill Kerr), a vengeful hunter whose infant grandson was killed by the beast (although the film was based on a novel, it’s hard to ignore parallels with Azaria Chamberlain’s disappearance at Uluru a few years earlier).    Razorback was Russell Mulcahy’s second feature and—along with his impressive music videos—Hollywood calling card. It’s also his only Australian feature that’s of a piece with his American genre fare ( Swimming Upstream and In Like Flynn are bot...

  Dark City  opens with John (friend of Australian cinema Rufus Sewell, In a Savage Land ) waking in a bathtub in a dimly lit hotel room in a dimly lit city, with blood on his forehead, a dead woman in the next room, and no memory of who he is or how he got there. He goes on the lam and starts to piece together who he is, guided by the bread-crumbs left by Dr Schreber, a mad scientist type (friend of Australian cinema Kiefer Sutherland, Paradise Found and lovingly photographed by Dean Semler in Young Guns I and II , The Three Musketeers , and The Cowboy Way ). In pursuit of John is a weary (or maybe just sleepy) detective Bumstead (William Hurt) and, separately, a group of pale-faced, black-clad “Strangers” who John witnesses shutting the city down at midnight and “tuning” (that is, altering) the environment and its occupants’ identities.     It’s a terrific setup for one of the very best science-fiction films of the 1990s. Dark City is a film of impeccab...