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.
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