Cirrus@Austlit

'Follow the daredevil adventures of Anglo Australian film maker - and Ozploitation pioneer - Brian Trenchard-Smith through a 50 year career dedicated to giving his audience thrills, spills, laughs and gasps. "The Man From Hong Kong", "Turkey Shoot," " Dead End Drive In", "Siege Of Firebase Gloria", "Stunt Rock", "Leprechaun 3 & 4," and Nicole Kidman's first film "BMX Bandits" have earned his work a cult following. His TV output includes "Silk Stalkings"," Five Mile Creek", "Tarzan", "Flipper", "Chemistry". The Fantaspoa Fantastic Film Festival in Brazil honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Quentin Tarantino dubbed him his " favorite obscure director....great energy, great sense of humor." Brian Trenchard-Smith's wry, insightful tales of the creative challenges of low budget movie making all over the world is both a personal journey and a portrait of his era.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This article argues that despite the genre status of the Mad Max films as post-apocalyptic sf, the driving force behind many of the images and concerns of the films derives from aspects of Australian history since colonisation. The article compares the way these themes appear in the Mad Max films to the way they are explored in ‘Crabs’, a 1972 short story by Australian writer Peter Carey. This story was later filmed as Dead End Drive-In, a film which itself draws on the aesthetic already developed through the Mad Max films. I use Freud’s theory of repetition compulsion to explore ways in which history is both remembered and deliberately forgotten through imagery that is dislocated from the past to the ‘future’ and thus in effect to a timeless, ever-present or ever-recurring time. The article also argues that Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (a space that is populated by a selected, heterogenerous group such inmates in a prison), describes the reality of the penal colonies forming the origins of settler Australia. The colony’s status as heterotopia has led to a pervasive sense of the ‘irreality’ of Australia for many non-Indigenous Australians, expressed through numerous artworks: a sense that there is no ‘there’ out there, nowhere to run.' (Publication abstract)

'“Is that about Dorothy or Down Under?”

'That’s the question a friend posted on Facebook in response to my search for horror geeks who would talk to me about the exploitation subgenre Ozploitation. I’ll forgive him for not knowing that the Oz here refers to Australia, not Munchkinland. Ozploitation remains an under-the-radar monster, at least in the United States.' (Introduction)

'INT. LONDON UNDERGROUND PLATFORM DAY

England 1983. Commuters stand in silent groups awaiting the next rattling arrival on the Piccadilly Line.

Work, consume, be silent, die - is etched on the faces of many. The Thatcher Years.

Only two men are having a conversation; one, a young movie geek, the other, a national newspaper film critic (although in fact he sees himself as a Cinema Critic)' (Introduction)