Endless highways, eerie hospitals, and biker gangs: the ozploitation label brings together very different Australian films. Tarantino’s connection to them makes it possible to begin with specific titles, without inventing a ranking.
The documentary that brought a scattered fan base together
Not Quite Hollywood, directed by Mark Hartley and released in 2008, offers the clearest starting point for understanding Quentin Tarantino’s advocacy for this cinema. His appearances are part of a choral history of Australian exploitation cinema. Hartley explained in a July 2009 interview that he interviewed him before securing funding and that material helped present the project. His participation, then, goes beyond the decorative cameo of a celebrity who likes bloody movies.
Ozploitation refers to a group of Australian productions aimed at impact, popular entertainment, and genre markets. It includes sex comedy, horror, adventure, action, and road narratives. Not all of them share the same style or present the same Australia. It is worth letting go of the expectation of finding only variations on Mad Max: a telekinesis story in a hospital and a thriller about truck drivers can belong to the journey even if they build suspense in opposite ways.
To distinguish preferences from associations, there is a second especially useful reference: the program Tarantino put together for the New Beverly in March 2011. He included Road Games and Stone. That schedule documents a selection meant for public exhibition, without any need to turn it into a ranking of his best Australian films. It also makes it possible to separate the director’s recommendation from the opinions other journalists added when announcing the series.
Roadgames and Patrick: two ways to trap the viewer
Roadgames, by Richard Franklin, is a good first choice for anyone who prefers suspense to explicit horror. Released in 1981, it puts Stacy Keach behind the wheel of a truck and Jamie Lee Curtis along the path of a criminal suspicion. The road seems to offer freedom, but the protagonist ends up trapped in what he thinks he saw. Following vehicles, watching gestures, and filling in stories about strangers turns an open landscape into an investigation without guarantees.
The film can be read as a game between perception and mobility. In a house, it is possible to return to a room and verify a clue; on a road, people disappear and distances change the possibilities. The truck driver has a high vantage point and many hours to look, but observing does not make him omniscient. The humor in his banter and mental associations keeps the intrigue from becoming a simple series of anonymous threats.
Its inclusion in the March 2011 program is the dated recommendation here. The reading of the suspense mechanism is a critical suggestion for viewing, not a restatement of Tarantino’s own words. Anyone who comes expecting an exact equivalent of Death Proof will find a shared territory, vehicles, and attention to movement, but a different narrative. Franklin gives the observer plenty of room for imagination before confirming or undoing his conclusions.
Patrick, also directed by Franklin, was released in 1978. Hartley’s documentary brings it back within that same cinephile landscape; Tarantino’s admiration for it is again noted in the SBS interview with Hartley published in 2013. This is the original film, not the remake Hartley directed decades later. The distinction matters because sharing a title is not the same as sharing a cast, staging, or an identical recommendation.
Here the threat comes from an apparently immobile patient and the activity that hidden stillness conceals. The hospital imposes routines, hierarchies, and a professional confidence in what can be measured. Horror introduces a will that does not fit those observations. Unlike the movement in Roadgames, Patrick works with the persistence of a body in one place: watching the patient and deciding what he understands becomes a form of suspense.
Stone and a route of discovery without a false list
Stone, directed by Sandy Harbutt in 1974, completes a different entry in the cycle. Tarantino included it as a midnight screening that March 2011. The film approaches the world of a biker gang through a policeman who has to live among them. The story’s interest lies as much in the criminal threat as in the group’s codes: who belongs, what behavior seems suspicious, and how much a newcomer can understand.
Watching it after Franklin’s two films helps reveal the label’s range. The biker community produces a collective occupation of space; the hospital concentrates tension around one individual; the road dissolves certainties among strangers. There is no need to pretend that Tarantino made that comparison in order to use it as an itinerary. These are three narrative experiences with different documentary supports and a verifiable link to his cinephile activity.
Hartley’s documentary then helps broaden the map, paying attention to who recommends each title and from what memory. The contributions of actors, technicians, and directors are not interchangeable with Tarantino’s. Within that diversity, articles on Australian cinema in its influences and the grindhouse culture of exploitation cinema make it possible to continue from viewer preferences toward his work as a filmmaker.
Back to Tarantino recommendations by genre.