Endless roads, eerie hospitals and biker gangs: the ozploitation label brings together very different Australian films. Tarantino’s relationship with them makes it possible to start with specific titles, without inventing a ranking.
The documentary that brought a scattered fanbase together
Not Quite Hollywood, directed by Mark Hartley and released in 2008, offers the clearest starting point for understanding Quentin Tarantino’s advocacy of this cinema. His contributions form 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 that material helped to present the project. His participation therefore goes beyond the decorative appearance of a famous face who likes blood-soaked films.
Ozploitation refers to a set of Australian productions aimed at impact, popular entertainment and genre markets. It includes sex comedy, horror, adventure, action and road stories. They do not all share the same aesthetic or present the same Australia. It is worth abandoning the expectation of finding only variations on Mad Max: a story of telekinesis in a hospital and a thriller about lorry drivers can belong to the same journey, even if they organise suspense in opposite ways.
To distinguish preferences from associations, there is a second particularly useful reference: the programme Tarantino put together for the New Beverly in March 2011. It included Road Games and Stone. That schedule documents a selection for public screening, 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 season.
Roadgames and Patrick: two ways of enclosing 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 lorry and Jamie Lee Curtis on the trail of a criminal suspicion. The road seems to offer freedom, but the protagonist ends up trapped by what he thinks he has seen. 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 check a clue; on the road, people disappear and distances alter opportunities. The lorry driver has a raised vantage point and many hours to look, but observing does not make him omniscient. The humour of his conversation and mental associations stops the intrigue from becoming a simple succession of anonymous threats.
Its place in the March 2011 programme is the dated recommendation here. The reading of the suspense mechanism is a critical proposal for viewing, not a reproduction of Tarantino’s words. Anyone arriving expecting an exact equivalent of Death Proof will find a kinship of setting, 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 recovers it 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 hidden by that stillness. The hospital imposes routines, hierarchies and a professional trust in what can be measured. Horror introduces a will that does not fit those observations. Faced with the movement in Roadgames, Patrick works with the persistence of a body in one place: looking at 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 into the cycle. Tarantino included it as a midnight screening in that March 2011 programme. The film approaches the world of a biker gang through a policeman who has to live with them. The interest of the story lies as much in the criminal threat as in the group’s codes: who belongs, what behaviour seems suspicious and how much a newcomer can understand.
Watching it after Franklin’s two films helps to show the range of the label. The biker community creates a collective occupation of space; the hospital concentrates tension around one individual; the road dissolves certainties among strangers. There is no need to pretend Tarantino made that comparison in order to use it as an itinerary. These are three narrative experiences with different documentary supports and a traceable link to his cinephilia.
Hartley’s documentary then helps broaden the map, paying attention to who recommends each title and from which memory. The contributions of actors, technicians and directors are not interchangeable with Tarantino’s. Within that diversity, articles on Australian cinema in his influences and the grindhouse culture of exploitation cinema make it possible to move from the viewer’s preferences towards his work as a filmmaker.
Back to Tarantino recommendations by genre.