When we think about the Australian movies of the 1970s and 1980s most of us recall art house hits such as “Picnic at Hanging Rock” and “Breaker Morant,” but as the new DVD documentary “Not Quite Hollywood” demonstrates, we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg on this side of the Pacific.
Mark Hartley’s delirious and rather shocking movie traces the history of “Ozploitation,” the low-budget horror flicks and nudie comedies that revived the Australian film industry after decades of virtually no production.
The theater business Down Under was dominated by American and British product in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, but the rise of drive-ins and the emergence of some very adventuruous directors led to a wave of crazy but highly profitable B-movies.
Those films in turn helped push directors such as Peter Weir — who got his 
start with a surreal action flick called “The Cars That Ate Paris” — in the direction of higher toned fare such as “Gallipoli” and “The Last Wave.”
The Aussie Bs also provided work for young actors like Jack Thompson and Nicole Kidman (above) and Mel Gibson who would dominate A-list productions in the country as the film industry began to boom.
“Not Quite Hollywood” is raunchy and at a few points disgusting as we see clips from sex/horror pictures like “Alvin Purple” (right) and “Dead Kids.” But Hartley has edited the clips with great flair and includes excellent interviews with filmmakers and actors, most of whom had no delusions of grandeur about what they were working on. There is also terrific interview footage with B-movie connoisseur Quentin Tarantino who saw many of the pictures on cheap videocassettes that were retitled — and sometimes dubbed into “American English” — for the U.S. market.
Few of us (other than Tarantino) would want to sit through any of these pictures in their entirety, but the clips (and the copious extras on the DVD) are lots of fun.
