Review: THE BLACK PHONE

Finney is a good kid but he's bullied. His sister Gwen is more feisty but is plagued by the kind of clairvoyant dreams their dead mother had. Drunk Dad is tortured by her powers and he takes it out on her with a looped belt. There is a shadow over the town in the form of a child snatcher dubbed The Grabber. Gwen's dreams are starting to return details of his M.O. When Finney is grabbed, she has to dream for his life. Meanwhile, in The Grabber's lair, Finney has to cope with the constant threat of his captor while working out how to escape. Then the dead old bakelite phone on the wall starts ringing. If this sounds like another Stephen King adaptation, know that the story it's based on was written by Joe Hill, King's son. Apples and their falling distance from trees.

Ok, cheap shots aside, there wouldn't seem to be much to say about this one. It hits its marks and says its lines exactly as expected, never straying too far into the darker realm of its promise so as to alienate its core audience (i.e. anyone who buys a ticket). The Grabber's menace, even though he has clearly killed his other victims, feels less serious than the malevolence of the bullies at school and he leaves Finney alone in the basement with plenty of light and time to think and chat with the ones who call him on the phone (that's in the trailer). Even the ploy (which I won't spoil) by which The Grabber teases Finney (and had done to the others) allows for a lot of leeway. The difference between what we increasingly learn of the victims' fate and Finney's relative ease is never quite squeezed into tension. 

The '70s setting is pleasantly evoked with a kind of moody under-stopped daylight and a far more muted approach to the hair and clothes styles of the day. This continues into Gwen's dreamscapes which frequently look like real life. Only one sourced period pop song blares out and its appearance is appropriate. Later an extract of a sequence from Dark Side of the Moon pops up but is again functional. This is highly accomplished world building, big enough, you'd think, for a few urban legend style scares but that's where the letdown happens, in the fulfilment of the promise.

It is always better to obscure a monster than diminish them through overexposure (see The Descent) and the trope here is the mask that The Grabber wears. It is a modular thing, now grinning like a comic book villain, now frowning like the back of Janus' head, eyes sometimes exposed, sometimes framed by ugly wrinkled latex. What exposes The Grabber is the assured performance of Ethan Hawke and his restrained vocal delivery. We get to know him pretty well, despite supply of zero backstory, and he eases us into a lull that cannot be broken by episodes of violence which feel pragmatic rather than terrifying.

There is a scene in which Finney remembers lying on the living room floor at his home, watching a let night horror movie. It's The Tingler, the old William Castle shocker. Castle's gimmick was gimmicks. He liked electrifying cinema seats, having ghosts "fly" out of the screen on pulleys and whatever else he could think of to extend the movie experience, a definite ancestor to augmented reality gaming. One of the gimmicks in The Tingler is featured in the scene we see Finney watching. A woman is unknowingly going through an LSD trip (first in a fiction film, 1958!) and she sees her normal black and white bath tub hold a mass of rich red blood. A hand extends through the surface and begins to make pinching motions. The reason you don't see the woman in her black and white scenes and the blood or bloodied hand is that the latter were shot in colour on a set where everything else was painted on the grey scale. This looks bizarre the first time you see it as, simple as it was, it's hard to reconcile with the shots around it and not obvious how it was done.

But that is the difference between the old carny-style shocker and this contemporary offering from the similarly motivated Blumhouse stable. With all the acting talent, strength of source material and effects shots for days, it's still down to a few jump scares and the assumption that audience imagination will fill in the blanks. But that can't happen when the blanks are already filled and the darkness gets a performance that verges on charming. As goofy as Castle's proto acid trip from 1958 we are really only getting familiar current mainstream horror tropes replayed.

Director Scott Derrickson has had a presentable career in film. The Exorcism of Emily Rose featured Jennifer Carpenter suggesting demonic possession mostly through physical performance alone which was impressive. But he is better known in the genre for Sinister. Sinister is a supernatural tale which frequently tops the lists of the scariest movies ever made by people who don't watch scary movies. It features a demonic figure that looks like a child designed it and a plot with a lot of idiotic character decisions. I can leap abysmal plot holes if other elements of a horror movie are strong but these were undercooked and assumptive. And that's the problem with The Black Phone it wants your indulgence without having to do all that pesky work. A film that is resolutely ok.

MULHOLLAND DR. @20 (Spoilers ahoy!)

A digital video dance extravaganza as young couples in forties cosplay drift across the screen to a big band boogie. A solemn tour of an empty bed with the sound of quiet breathing. Then a lady in a limo escapes both an assassination and head on crash and wanders down to darkest L.A., sneaks into an apartment where bright young Betty has come to find fame and fortune in the city o' angels. The mystery girl calls herself Rita after a poster and the pair set out on a sleuth's tour of the berg of gumshoes and noir. That and a big time audition; it's just like a movie. And that's the point.

And then, somewhere in the middle of it all, after intimidating cowboys, mafia bosses with celestial standards for espresso, cheating Hollywood wives, a stunning first audition in front of movies heavyweights and so much more, there is a point of scission during which Betty and Rita suffer a traumatising vision of reality after which everything is reversed. We have been watching Diane dreaming of being instantly successful Betty and Adam, the hotshot director who rejected her for Rita (who is really Camilla), is humiliated by mobsters into casting one of their girlfriends. The relationship between Betty and Rita outside of the dream is a complex emotional torture instead of the burning love story it came to be.

This film began as a ninety minute pilot for a TV series that was canned before it aired. David Lynch hawked it to those nice hommes at Studio Canal who'd been so helpful with the dark and nasty sequel to Twin Peaks and the coldly alienating Lost Highway. They ponied up for the conversion to a feature with a further hour of story and an even more involved plot than the body hopping Lost Highway. It paid off. Mulholland Dr. brought Lynch back from arthouse penury and, however briefly, back to the attention of the mainstream. Not even the mostly sweet (with some smuggled darkness) Straight Story which he made for Disney did the business like this complicated but strong tragedy.

The TV pilot origins show through with a choir stall of characters who only appear in the first phase like the detectives or the guys at Winkies. But then Lynch was able to incorporate into the dream logic what he couldn't expand into the rest of the film. The guy at Winkies tells his friend of a nightmare he had that involved the setting they are both in. He's here to dispel the dread of the dream but it comes true (in a jump scare for the ages) and he collapses as the audio blurs and blends into the deep drone on the track. It's like a capsule of Diane's life in Hollywood. The hitman stumbling through a black comedy of errors in the beginning re-emerges in the second phase as a much more sinister figure. We don't need to see the mafiosi after the "production meeting" scene again as they have done their job in the story (though we do get a few more glimpses at the coffee-obsessed brother, played by composer and long-time Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti). The little man in the secluded room seems to be controlling even the gangsters with the phrase "the girl is still missing" taking on the meaning that she has not yet been cast in the film. The nice old couple who travelled with Betty soon after head somewhere in a limo, laughing evilly. They turn up at the end as miniature sprites in Diane's ridicule. Even the frightening bum from behind Winkies reappears in yet another controlling role. Successive viewings allow these features clarity which the first one offers as bewildering.

If those demonstrate how well a film maker can save an incomplete narrative by transporting it into fulfilled tragedy with more material (and this is a triumph of that) Lynch's tropes and tricks are thrown at the screen and speakers without pause. Art Deco interiors that feel unsettling or Googie architecture diners that host Nancy Drew mystery solving as well as hit contract meetings. Images of L.A. as a smouldering urban jungle. Bizarre characters like the cowboy who seems to carry his own remote electricity and is effortlessly intimidating. The whacked out cabaret show where nothing is what it seems and an impassioned Spanish version of Crying sends Betty into uncontrollable tears before revealing that it, too, is only appearance. Diane's suicide leaves her corpse enveloped by a cloud of reversing gunsmoke. Audio details of scenes are given an exaggerated volume. The moment of scission when Betty and Rita are confronted with Diane's decomposing corpse on the bed where the camera speed is distorted along with the audio taking on a delirious quality. Lynch is using everything he knows about his medium either in the conventional story of the first phase and the unconventional motion of the second. Of all his back catalogue, this was his most disciplined feature film since Eraserhead.

I'll trot out my favourite observation about Lynch here, that his films are not  heavily intellectual but emotionally deep. Here he is depicting the capital of the American film industry as a character with aerial city scapes that shimmer with heat by day or glow softly through black nights. And he is showing us what he and anyone who has worked in Hollywood long enough knows, that most bright young Bettys are rendered into crushed and broken Dianes. The casting of Naomi Watts in this role proved perfect. Her performance stretches from a kind of  antiseptic Debbie Reynolds as Betty to her broken alter ego Diane who rages or restrains herself in the face of a great, dark pain. It is impossible not to emote with her and every viewing past the first gives even her early naïve Betty scenes a tint of the tragedy to come as we know we are only seeing her self ideal. Mulholland Dr. awarded Watts with stardom and she has been a go to name for range but particularly the fearless intensity she brings here. 

After this, Lynch moved on to one final (to date) feature that involved psychogenic fugue, completing a trilogy of them from Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. and then Inland Empire. While the latter has lost more fans of the director than it garnered, it remains a committed work of surgical character examination. Several steps down from the 35 mm sumptuousness of Mulholland Dr. (it is shot on consumer grade digital video from the mid-2000s) it nevertheless presents a genuine vision. More recently Lynch returned to Twin Peaks with what he regarded as an 18 hour film which rather than an easy route of fan service disappointed everyone who was hankering for the old show's quirky locals and dark supernature. For any who made it through it delivered a reward with a tragic revelation and a horrifying coda.

Because of this kind of commitment, Mulholland Dr. feels as fresh today as it did when it hit Australian cinemas in 2002. The central tale of defeated dreams is as old as time but set in the forbidding beauty that Lynch commands for the best of his work it was rendered bold and of its own kind. Does it give viewers who attempt to answer all its mysteries headaches? Maybe, but all good fiction should to some extent guard its own shadows. What comes across in Mulholland Dr. is the conviction by Lynch that he is telling his story the best way he knows. That that way should involve individualistic cinema that speaks through its idiosyncrasies to our nervous systems only serves to give it longevity. If I have been successful in giving you a reason to revisit it, enjoy, and be assured that the final word by the bizarre bue-beehived  character is no more cryptic than the last line of Hamlet. Relax, forget trying to explain it all, concentrate on your emotional response and it will all make sense. Promise.

1982 @ 40: THE THING

A flying saucer grazes the Earth's atmosphere as it zooms by. We don't see it fall in but as it disappears into the dark it looks red hot. Credits, a low brooding drone given form by a thumping bass guitar. Antarctic Mountains. A helicopter is chasing a husky who evades bullets and grenades until reach an American outpost. The dog runs to his new best friends as the chopper crew manage to blow themselves to barbeque. The dog gets the run of the station until he bites one of the men and is sent to be with the other dogs who snarl at him until he turns into a tentacled monstrosity and starts absorbing them. Hearing the yelps the station crew run to the kennels with flamethrowers. Dammit, they thought the South Pole gig was gonna be a doddle.

The cast present a good range of masculinity from Kurt Russell's frontier machismo to Richard Masur's strong silent type to T.K. Carter's funky urban to Donald Moffat's military ruthlessness to Wilford Brimley's civil, grey haired science, and more. It is easy to see this as being film about male competitiveness and develop a commentary on the extremity that forces cooperation. The fear of penetration by a colonising other is there on screen all the time. While I doubt that considerations like this were too far away from Carpenter's thinking as he put this one together it strikes me that they were subtexts he used for the drama, not the other way around. They're still there, just not doing the job they usually do.

The body horror of the mutative fusions, the sudden extremity of the violence responding to the appearance of alienness and the great featureless white of the world around them make for a sobering meditation on the isolation, the shared loneliness of despair. If anything felt like the nuclear threat back in the early '80s it was this. Carpenter's action is dependably compelling and here, with the best practical effects he ever worked with, his weird scenes push so hard against what his viewers might have feared (at least the ones in the early '80s) that he had one character watching a severed head sprout spider legs and walk away say what the audience was thinking: "You gotta be fucking kidding."

John Carpenter's Thing ditched the carrot suit of the '50s version, went back to the source and amped up the paranoia of an alien that could adopt any appearance and intelligence it needed. Just enough backstory is delivered through action and reasoning and the rest of the tale is about fear of the familiar. Is that thing he said the truth or what the Thing needs us to believe? Characters that, through elegant writing economy are rendered potentially terrifying simply for acting like themselves. The worse this gets the more it points to a scorched earth solution. Is that what it will take?

Carpenter had begun his feature film career less than a decade prior to this. It was also science fiction (Dark Star) but its alien character was a barely disguised beach ball. With scant means but great style he fashioned the action classic Assault on Precinct 13 and the and the immortal slasher Halloween. By the time The Thing came up he was dealing a big studio budget that included a massive allocation for practical effects. Other directors climbing from cash-strapped indy to the major label clubhouse can fall on their faces just in the execution let alone the success of their mainstream works. Carpenter, gave us a magnificent imaginative movie  with a score by Morricone (who did a kind of cover version of Carpenter's own film music) where the scariest notions were extended into advanced level practical effects and the scope felt as big as the continent it was set on. And then it fell on its face.

Common wisdom puts the blame for The Thing's failure in cinemas on Carpenter reading the room all wrong. Alien was a few years back. This was the year of E.T., the loveable off-worlder that everyone wanted to cuddle. Carpenter had already added scenes to The Fog to bring them up to 1980 and, armed to the teeth with money for everything and a big warm go ahead to helm a project that had been left a long time in turnaround, he threw everything he could at the project and emerged with a bona fide genre classic. But the problem was that everything else was getting warm 'n' fuzzy endings. Even Poltergeist with Tobe Texas Chainsaw Hooper in the chair felt like a Spielberg movie (some accounts say it was one) I don't even have to spoil the ending to write that the course of events in The Thing at the halfway mark prevent the question of the situation reversing into happyland. The question of how much worse is a better one. To a culture in the scariest phase of the Cold War yet, the notion of mutually assured destruction was not the stuff of cuteness. 

John Carpenter has enjoyed a rich career making genre films that stand up to time and continue to be justly celebrated. There are enough and there is distinction enough to pick and choose, to be a Halloweenite or an Escape From New Yorker (I'm increasingly a Prince of Darkness-zen) but his own stated favourite is this one. Like many things that didn't blow up the box office The Thing rose to furtive life and perennialism on the then new home video market and remains one of the essential spines on the shelves of any physical media collector.

And for its grimness it is still a welcome watch forty years later. If the mutations look increasingly plasticky the higher your resolution (I saw it in 4K for this) the brooding silence and the humming spaces of the station still generate a fight or flight in us. But the more I see it the more I understand how wearying it felt to people living under the ICBM flightpaths with a cowboy in the Whitehouse and a Cossack in the Kremlin. The negotiations that will lead to the worst mutuality didn't even have the relief of a wisecracking Arnold Schwarzenegger. For all the snappiness of the dialogue and the engaging procedural language I'm just brought back to the threats: Trumpism, climate change, pandemic, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy cookers on parade and I think as the credits roll that I just had fun watching a great movie but I also feel exhausted. Not exhausted as after the catharsis of a well told tale but from one that refused to sing a sad song to make it better. It's Throbbing Gristle not Joy Division. It's Threads not The Day After. It's Come and See not Saving Private Ryan. It's The Thing not E.T. And it's completely bloody wonderful. Pass me some of that whiskey, now.

Suspiria @ 45

Suzy flies to Germany to study advanced dance but gets knocked back at the door after getting all but knocked over by a raving student who flees into the storm, finds a friend in town who gets murdered in a brutal knife attack along with the panicky one. The next day Suzy gets into the school but doesn't have a room so she has to flat up with the scratchiest cat at school but then after a weird moment with the light of the hallway flunks her first class by staggering and collapsing. She wakes up in a dorm room, ditched by Olga the Catty. Way to start the school year, Sooozeee.

All that plot happens in the first twenty minutes of this film that is often derided as a plotless exercise in style over substance. Of course, if you do see it there's every chance you might agree. The richness of the visuals, bludgeoning of the score and the intensity of the violence really can distract folk from what is a pretty eventful ride along the darker side of Supernature Strasse. Director and co-writer Dario Argento, having made the monumental giallo movie Deep Red broke from his string of bloody thrillers to venture into horror. But due to a few twists and turns and telephone game developments he made Suspiria which, while it often looks like all out horror, forges its own path beside the genre.

Argento began with De Quincey's essay on European occultism Suspiria de Profundis about a network of powerful witches. Daria Nicolodi added a lot of folklore and one of her own dreams that informed the finale of the film. She also wrote the characters of the students, as violent as it always was, as children. Put all that together and you will have a densely structured mystical epic with unwatchable violence against children. So take some stuff away, bit by bit, but keep everything that still stands pushed forward and you get this film: a sleepwalking sprint through a nightmare.

So when Sarah is trying to escape from the shadowy assailant in the back corridors and stops to build a staircase to the window with old travel trunks while the latch is being caressed teasingly with a cut throat razor, it feels like a dream where the threat could be something innocuous by day, and barriers to action can be gratingly stubborn. The town square scene's alternating pace adds anxiety to the thick eeriness. To any who complain that there's not a lot of witchiness on display for a witchy movie but that scene, the opening murder extravaganza and all of the other kills take on a queasy feel when considered as acts of the witches. The one time we do see anything like a ritual it is set in the tense climactic finale and its calmness feels very ugly. Monsters can look like anyone on the electoral roll in a dream. Argento wanted an intense colour pallet dominated by blue and red. Intentional use of old filmstock and the soon to be outmoded Technicolor process he sought a oversaturated look like a live action Disney animation. The near-psychedelic effect of this drives the nightmare.

Argento again paired up with Claudio Simonetti's Goblin for the score. Their music for Deep Red had already added power to an already charged film. Here it ranges from the fragile but insistent short modal melody on a celesta so perfectly sealed it can be repeated at length without exhausting its listeners. Under its medieval delicacy a raft of other voices waft or rasp or thud or groan as synthesisers, tom toms, harsh voiced whispers and wails can build to a cyclonic roar or fall to a tiny jangle. If Deep Red's music had boldly gone prog baroque this one seems to grow from the visuals like a fungus. I was lucky enough to witness a live performance of it by Goblin to a projection of the film at ACMI a decade ago which was a hell of a thrill.

The end credits make a big statement out of how this film was shot in English. This really means that the Europudding cast had to learn their lines phonetically which can give their performances a stilted quality that in turn can leave the impression that no one in the movie can act a single line. Well, all dialogue in Italian films at this time and many years afterwards was post synch. Even the native or fluent Anglophones like star Jessica Harper or Udo Kier recorded their lines post production. But for me this really just feeds the dream logic tone by keeping the action a step shy of realism.

That said, Jessica Harper's Suzy is an unexpected centre of gravity, a foot on the floor while trying to sleep drunk. She undercuts her  childlike doe eyed beauty with New York smarts, giving us an effortlessly assured guiding presence, even in peril (and peril in Suspiria is hard edged and bloody)  We watch her and think she'd make a great lifelong friend. 

That's another thing; friend, not lover. For all the potential sexiness in the setting of leotard nirvana sex  is the one thing that does not visit the screen. Like the too high door handles and puerility of some of the spatting dialogue, this is the original intent of casting children showing through. The problems of presenting children under such attack and then possibly worsened by erotic suggestion pretty much forbade that approach before it could take wing. What remains is more unreality, more nightmare.

Joan Bennett shows as a Mme Blanc as porcelain white as her name with a pair of sapphire eyes that attack. Udo Kier as Mr Exposition keeps to himself in a thankless role (which I use to call the infomercial scene), needing only a little gravitas to augment his prettiness. But it is Alida Valli who really shines here, barnstorming as the strutting Miss Tanner, as gleefully Teutonic as close to a Swastika-ed camp guard as you'd expect in a serious teacher of dance. While she does take pains to add a little range to her character, she leans on her sheer magnetic force, the perfect nemesis for Harper's affable modern woman.

I first saw this as a rented VHS. It's a very different experience from the wide screen spectacle of seeing it at a venue like Melbourne's Astor picture palace. In 4X3 the academy looms out as a great red wall, offering no relief. The pool scene is far more intimate and the murder scenes pop from being magnified. A little while after, I bought the Anchor Bay triple DVD set with extras and a soundtrack CD. The remastering job was stellar with intense colour, crystal audio and a big washy surround mix. From there the presentations only improved right up to the stellar Synapse 4K that I watched for this article. If I miss the look of it on video tape it has more to do with the thrill of the first viewing of a favourite than the medium but the memory of the claustrophobic version remains. 

A friend of mine remarked, as I was running the 4K, that he doesn't think he even sees the film anymore when it's on. It is so eminently rewatchable that many full or partial views later the violence, once confronting and merciless, now feels safely familiar and the slight feel of the plotting lets it down. But last night I watched it without distraction or breaks with the Dolby Atmos on high, enveloping me in its restless energy, and just let the force of it in. One complaint I recall, especially when people were comparing it to the pointless reimagining from 2018, that this dance movie has no dancing but that's all I can call the Sarah chase scene. People who direct fight scenes in films are credited as choreographers for good reason. Even the first eyepoppingly violent murder scene has a balletic sense of movement. I suppose that's the trouble with some viewers and this movie. The ballet looks like murder and the horror looks like a dream. Well, works for me.

Review: X

A Kombi full of Texan city slickers rolls into the rural realm to shoot the porn flick that they hope will make their careers leap into the mainstream. It's 1979, the age of legitimised pornography like Deep Throat and Debbie Does Dallas, so that's not too kooky a notion. It's also the age when young directors were pushing upwards into the mainstream with effective horror movies done on tiny budgets like, um Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre with which this film with its 4 X 3 opening scene promises kinship. So we got us a porny horror indy about indy porn looking like an indy slasher. Great.

When the cast and crew van up to the old farmhouse they are met with the shotgun of the owner who has forgotten he authorised the rental. It's sorted out by the confident producer who stands his ground and explains. But the old man is still an ornery cuss. One of the cast, surveying the scene, catches sight of a frail old woman with a wan expression who, in this shot, might not even be alive or even truly there.

So the gang gits down to the bang with lots of suggested sex on screen and dialogue about the movies and how this one will breakthrough to the big time. Meanwhile the old lady in the window before is real and stirring to life and is angry about it. The old man is getting worried about her. There's a gator in the waterin' hole yonder and fer goshsakes nuthin's endin' well around these here parts.

What follows is a standard slasher which, despite some well crafted gore, fails to deliver much tension and falls completely short on scares. There is a lot of othering about aging and sex including a scene that is meant to disgust younger viewers (destroying the context that's meant to support it). This is not to say it's not entertaining, it is and constantly. It's more that, having given us such a promising start it implodes into cliche and stays in that state until the end where a zinger is delivered in the dialogue that supposed to drip with irony but just feels written. Credits. There is reputedly a trailer for a prequel which I didn't bother waiting for.

Writer/director Ti West does this a lot, appealing and engaging start with a feeble finish straight from the text book. He enjoys a similar reputation to the young John Carpenter but where Carpenter invented tropes that became cliches in others' hands, West just picks them off the shelf after squandering well crafted characters and world building. Well, should say here, we don't get so much of the craft in the characterisation as everyone on screen seems to have been left in the fridge outside of their packaging and brought out odourless and flavourless.

After this I watched the beginning scenes of Boogie Nights and got to the scene where pornographer Jack Horner is explaining his vision of a porn industry as a kind of mega cinema, delivering gratification along with all the life lessons of the classics. It's intended as risible but is yet given a kind of dignity as an expression of naive vulnerability. It's less hip than the industry discussion in X but it's memorable and layered and made me want to watch the rest.

X was rented for this from Google Play Movies.

1982@40: TURKEY SHOOT

A credit sequence montage of civil unrest being quashed leads us into scenes of the arrests of dissidents or those standing next to dissidents. The prisoners are clapped in yellow overalls and shipped out to a jungle prison camp run by sadistic guards and controlled by a sinister grey eminence. The latter invites the idle rich to the prison for human hunts which variously serve as capital executions or true life adventures. That's the movie.

Well, not quite. That describes most of the action for most of the running time but there's more on and through the screen going on. This is considered an Ozploitation classic along with the likes of Mad Max or Stone but, while it has the sleaze and action of those, there is an extra factor at work: Brian Trenchard-Smith. Trenchard-Smith's rap sheet makes him look like a lifelong jobber with a trove of tv credits alongside a good line-up of cinema and straight to vhs exploitation. But those latter titles were made with a lot more social commentary than they needed and by themselves make a good case against judging their maker too easily.

Whether it's this dystopian violence daydream or Frog Dreaming's uneasy mix of serious first nations mythologising and crass (if authentic) contemporary racial terms which would not get within a cooee of a screenplay now. The sadistic commandant Thatcher's name was borrowed from the then reigning British P.M. Margaret Thatcher without the slightest coincidence. The blending of accents from Australian to British to American transcends the charge of widening the potential box office, the suggestion that this oppression is effectively everywhere is clear. The jet fighters at the end bear RAAF insignia (would have been effectively impossible to have changed that) but the radio communications all sound American. For my part, I saw this as a fanciful expansion of the truncheon legislation of the Queensland state government I was subject to. It still feels politically and emotionally true.

What of Carmen Duncan's psycho aristocratic hunter who reveals her lesbianism suddenly when moving into her quarry like a python? Lesbianism goes hand in hand with exploitation cinema and will appear faster than you can say prison or vampire. It's a short cut to home video credentials because, more then than now, it has the appeal of instant othering. A year later Paul Cox depicted a lesbian initiation with candour and humour in Man of Flowers until it felt like an eiderdown. Duncan's lip licking predation here just joins the other blood-crazed monsters like the gun happy and sharply-names Tito, Noel Ferrier's queasy urbane depravity or Thatcher's cold process. We don't see the rape or murder of Lynda Stoner's character but we get a pan over her corpse afterwards with a bloodied body, torn clothes and more arrows than a damned soul in a Bosch painting. We are forced to fill the act in ourselves and it is ugly but the only people who aren't ugly here are the victims.

For the past decade or so the notion of a resurgence of Australian cinema has been couched in the plea to make more genre films. Ozploitation is the example trotted out time and again for its robust long term success in home media despite box office disappointment (as in the case of Turkey Shoot). The secondary plea is that of the entertainment-first drive of this kind of movie. For all the sensitive summers that changed lives to rawly adapted novels, the action-heavy gore fests rise easily to the top of the retrospective surface. 

While I have no problem with the idea I get the feeling, hearing the case being made again and again, that rather than Turkey Shoot which, for all its violence and sleaze, does have a point to make and is far from the kind of Ikea pack of joined thrills or othering being alluded to. The problem of ridiculing overstated performances is not that the joker doesn't get it it's that they ridicule the very values they would celebrate in more mainstream fare: showbiz and subtext. It is the awkwardness of a Turkey Shoot that calls to us across the decades in megaphone tones that oppression is bad because, however more smoothly we can put it, however more archly we can say it, oppression is bloody well bad.

Review: THE DROVER'S WIFE: THE LEGEND OF MOLLY JOHNSON

An opening that feels like a flash forward as a woman asleep at the reins of small horse drawn vehicle is held at gunpoint by an approaching horseman. Cut to her normal life, reaching for her rifle as strangers approach her cabin, tending to her kids and sweeping the stoney soil out the front with something between bush pragmatism and Samuel Beckett style futility. After shooting a rogue bullock, dressing and cooking it, she has to reach for the shooter again as a wagon clops up. It's the new district sergeant and spouse, hungry and asking for a bite of that bullock. Trade for trade, she, Molly, heavily pregnant, sends her kids off to the homestead of a relative with the couple and gets back to the work.

In the embryonic town we see that the riff raff have started the service and entertainment economies, looking for, "a fight, a fuck and a feed" before heading home. Sergeant Klintoff has his work cut out dealing with the desk-bound trooper and problems with mishandled negotiations with first peoples which has led to, from his point of view, the crime spree of a local whose charcoaled likeness fills up a wanted poster and the driveway of Molly Johnson. Molly is ready with the rifle but her baby is even more ready to get out and about. The standoff ends with her having to accept his help. His name, his real name, not the one on the wanted poster, is Yadaka.

Leah Purcell's bold appropriation of Henry Lawson's classic bush tale is an expansion rather than an adaptation and sits comfortably beside rather than within it. Lawson's story is about ten pages long and can be read in minutes but it needs longer to digest. Within a frame of the unnamed drover's wife organising her children out of harm's way as a snake makes its way into the log cabin there is a cosmos of her experience keeping nature and the worst of humanity at gunpoint or to the extent of her physical strength. She defends the home and family against bushfires, floods, rogue animals like the one in the early scene in this film, self-entitled swaggies who demand food and more. Finally, there needs to be a showdown with the snake and the suggestion that these challenges will continue as part of her life for the rest of her life. She has made her peace with her lot, however violent it can be, and is solidly experienced to defend it.

Purcell's movie says this and more. Introducing a stronger first peoples theme, she broadens the implications of the story, giving it both a more explicit historical and political bent, while remembering to amp up the humanity of the story so that her magnetic central performance calls constant attention to her troubles, the colonial society's troubles, and the great unfeeling cosmos that rolls by mutely in the many stunning nightscapes we are treated to.

Those landscapes and sky views are essential to the telling as they go beyond establishing the high country setting to provide a blend of natural awe and strange frenetically speeded up presentations which add an alien, magical tone. The harsh colonial ethics clash with the imported European aloofness of the more established settlers and the tens of thousands of years' kinship with the land and its value in scenes that now recall revenge westerns now folklore. This is aided buy a score that blends the electric guitars of Morricone's music for Leone and a persistent Celtic yearn on the string section. And what we are left with is homage, extension and an unignorable will for story.