AustLit

The first film in the Saw franchise, Saw introduces 'Jigsaw', a killer whose complex and sadistic traps are designed to 'test' his victims.

After a shower of mysterious meteorites turns the inhabitants of a small Australian fishing village into ravenous zombies, the infected must band together to find a way out.

Nineteen-year-old Jimmy finds himself accidentally in debt to local mob boss Pando, after failing to deliver $10,000 to a Bondi woman as promised. Through a series of accidents and with the intervention (often indirect) of Jimmy's dead brother (who acts as a guardian angel throughout the film), Jimmy attempts to work his way out of debt and secure both his own future and that of his love interest, Alex.

A vicious razorback boar terrorises the Australian outback, beginning with the death of a small child, whose grandfather is tried for his murder but acquitted. An American journalist (who holds strong conservationist views) follows the story and is attacked by two locals, who leave her for the boar to kill. Her husband then comes to Australia, determined to seek the boar who killed his wife (and, incidentally, revenge himself on the two locals).

Written by prolific screen-writer Everett De Roche, the film is based on a novel of the same name by American novelist Peter Brennan (a novel that, apparently, bears little resemblance to the film). The first full-length film directed by Russell Mulcahy, Razorback is a bridge between Mulcahy's early work on video clips and his later, more recognisable genre films, beginning (only two years after Razorback) with Highlander.

According to David Carroll at Tabula Rasa, 'Razorback is perhaps the most recognisable 'horror' film from Australia. It has a rising young director in the form of Russell Mulcahy, some reasonably well-known faces, both Australian and American, and a giant pig. It also has a depiction of the Australian outback as, basically, hell'.

Carroll specifies of the way in which the film approaches Australia (as a concept, rather than simply a country) that 'The brothers, their factory, the nightmare landscape and the pig itself, are all presented as a single, coherent malevolence. I have written previously, in more than one place, that the landscape is the defining feature of Australian horror. Razorback extends the idea into expressionism'. He emphasises that 'Of course, all this unnaturalistic splendour could just be attributed to shoddy film-making, but I don't think so. The change in tone and the way things are shot in different locations, such as Sarah's farm and the factory, is very striking, whilst the town itself shifts between the two. There seem to be two different realities, and a slippery border between them.'

Source: Tabula Rasa (http://www.tabula-rasa.info/AusHorror/Razorback.html). (Sighted: 15/6/2012)

'Pete and Jerry are cousins in their early twenties living together on the outskirts of Sydney. Their life consists of dead-end jobs, getting stoned, hanging out at the local pub and talking about girls. Which is fine until Cheryl enters their lives; she's sexy, confident and dangerous. When they both fall in love with her their lives spiral out of control. Dramatic, tense and explosive, WEST explores what happens when you discover how few choices you have in life...'

Source: Screen Australia.

Set in 1956 on an outback sheep station, the narrative explores the life of the old-time shearers: sweat-soaked days and rum-soaked nights, bloody two-fisted punch ups ... and the scab labour brought in during the shearers' strike of 1956. Central to the main storyline is Foley, a gun shearer who has been unbeaten in the tally for ten years, but who now arrives at the station aware that his days as the fastest shearer are now numbered.

Alvin is an average man, except that women find him irresistible. The only woman that Alvin really wants is his platonic friend Tina, but he appears to feel no sexual desire for her. He follows her to a convent, where he gets a job as gardener.

A 'sexist sex comedy', made during the peak of the feminist debate in Australia, Alvin Purple reverses the feminist polemic of men oppressing women by having its protagonist pursued by a constant stream of predatory women. He is victimised even more when he refuses sex. Paul Byrnes (Australian Screen) notes that 'the film was [also] reacting against entrenched puritanical attitudes in Australian society. To some it was prurient farce; to others, it was exposing the repression that produced such prurience.'

Tom O'Regan notes in 'Cinema Oz: The Ocker Films' (1989) that Alvin's 'ordinariness seems irresistible to women. The comedy is based on incongruity. Sex is rendered as slapstick. Jokes are at the expense of bastions of hypocrisy - psychiatry, the press and the law. The would-be recessive hero is the object of male sexual fantasy - sex without responsibility - a fantasy with which women could also apparently identify.'

[Source: Paul Byrnes, Tom O'Regan, and Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper]

Adapted from James Vance Marshall's novel The Children, Walkabout begins with a father-of-two driving his fourteen-year-old daughter and six-year-old son into the desert. Overwhelmed by the pressure on his life, he plans to kill them and then commit suicide, but his plan goes wrong. The siblings wander the desert aimlessly until they meet a young Aboriginal boy who is on a solitary walkabout as part of his tribal initiation into manhood. The three become travelling companions. Gradually, sexual tension develops between the girl and the Aboriginal boy. When they approach white civilisation, the Aboriginal boy dances a night-long courtship dance, but the girl is ignorant of its meaning. When she and her brother awake in the morning, they find the boy dead, hanging from a tree. The brother and sister make their way to the nearby mining town, where they receive a cool welcome from the townsfolk.

Tourists taking a crocodile-watching river cruise in Kakadu National Park find themselves trapped in the territory of a large, aggressive salt-water crocodile.

Inspired in part by some unsolved murders in the Australian outback, and by the gruesome backpacker murders committed by Ivan Milat in NSW during the late 1980s/early 1990s, Wolf Creek tells the story of three young backpackers, Ben Mitchell, an Australian, and Liz Hunter and Kristy Earl, both English. Although the girls don't know Ben all that well, he and Liz fancy each other. After buying a car in Broome, situated in the far north coast of Western Australia, the trio head east with the intention of driving across the top end to Cairns (Queensland). At the end of their first day in the desert, their car breaks down at a deserted tourist site - the large crater of a meteorite. Later that night a truck arrives, driven by a real outback character, Mick Taylor. He tows them to his isolated camp at an abandoned mine site, promising to fix their car. All three tourists fall asleep after Mick drugs them. When Liz wakes up, she is bound and gagged and her friends are missing and the nightmare begins.

Based on an original idea by Peter Weir, The Last Wave concerns a young Sydney lawyer who, while defending four Aboriginal men against a murder charge, becomes troubled by dreams. He soon begins to feel the pull of magic forces beneath the surface of civilisation. A series of apparently random occurences assume a disturbing pattern and the city becomes a facade for a place of ancient ritual.

Continuum began as a joint initiative between Tom O'Regan at Murdoch University and Brian Shoesmith at Edith Cowan University, Perth. From 1991-5 it was wholly located in the Centre for Research in Culture and Communication at Murdoch University. From mid-1995 it was located in the Department of Media Studies at Edith Cowan University.

Continuum is a thematically based cultural studies journal. The primary focus of the journal is upon screen media, but it also includes publishing, broadcasting and public exhibitionary media such as museums and sites. Journal editors are particularly interested in (1) the history and practice of screen media in Australasia and Asia ; (2) the connections between such media (particularly between film, TV, publishing, visual arts and exhibitionary sites). Each issue is devoted to the exploration of a particular cultural site. Sites have included Indigenous media, television, Asian cinema, media discourse, film style, publishing, photography, radio, 'Screening Cultural Studies', electronic arts in Australia and 'Critical Multiculturalism'. The journal is committed to articulating the energies, fragmentations, and loose coalitions that attend such cultural sites.

(Source : Continuum)

Set in 1965, Flirting is the sequel to The Year My Voice Broke. Danny Embling is now seventeen and a full-time boarder at St Alban's College. Although Danny's stutter and unsportsmanlike physique make him an object of derision to many of his fellow students, his life isn't all bad: he has a perfect view of Circester College, his college's sister school, from his dormitory window. The narrative follows his friendship with Thandiwe Adjewa, the daughter of an African Nationalist on an academic post in Canberra and a student at Circester. Danny and Thandiwe become kindred spirits, lovers, and problems for their teachers, whose methods of maintaining control are long detention sessions and a good thrashing with the cane. The only support they receive is from Nicola Radcliffe, Circhester's head prefect, who is sympathetic to their plight.

'A fly-on-the-wall mockumentary about the tears, tantrums and tiaras in the world of competitive dance eisteddfods. Amidst petty politics and creative controversy, RAZZLE DAZZLE delves into the lives of three stage mothers and their relationships with the dance school, each other and their children.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 18/12/2013)

A light-hearted look at the politics and intrigue of competitive ballroom dancing, the storyline focuses on Scott Hastings, who, his ambitious mother Shirley believes, will become champion with his current partner Liz. When Scott tries to introduce his own steps into their routine (against Pan-Pacific Championship rules), Liz leaves him for a rival partner. Without a partner, Scott eventually agrees to dance with Fran, a shy student at the academy run by his mother. When he meets her father and grandmother, Scott leans how to put passion into his movements, especially through the paso doble. In a last ditch effort to see her son become the Pan-Pacific Champion, Shirley convinces him to partner Tina Sparkle, which he reluctantly does. When he finally realises what he has done, he implores Fran to partner him. When they are disqualified from the competition, the audience (led by Scott's father, Barry) gives them a standing ovation and Scott and Fran go on to perform their version of the paso doble.

[Source: Australian Screen]

Beginning in Australia in the late 1940s, when movie theatres were the only source of audiovisual news coverage, the narrative follows the exploits of Len Maguire and his young sidekick Chris as they cover the big news stories for the Cinetone newsreel company. Len is a doggedly dependable and ever-cautious senior cameraman, trapped in a world of changing values. Len always knows the right thing to do, but becomes troubled as his marriage falters, his job becomes threatened by the arrival of television, and Cinetone is taken over and its work marginalised. Len's loyalties to the Catholic Church, the Labor Party, and his family are juxtaposed against both his brother/rival cameraman Frank--who sells out his values, abandons his responsibilities, and heads off to success in the USA--and his cocky young assistant, Chris.

The first feature film for Phillip Noyce, Newsfront also depicts the increasing changes to the Australian cultural and political landscape, tracing social shifts from the first waves of European post-war immigration through to the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne.

Set in a suburb of Sydney's North Shore on the night of the 1969 Australian Federal Election, this is a cinematic adaptation of David Williamson's 1971 satire of university-educated, upwardly mobile Australian Labor Party supporters. The gathering is hoping to celebrate the ALP's victory after two decades of conservative government, but as the results are televised throughout the night, this appears increasingly unlikely. The men then devote their energies to drinking and debauching with the younger women, much to the anger of their wives or girlfriends. As the night wears on and hopes fade, there is fighting and much disappointment.

The film's satire (as with the play) achieves its bite through a sense of what passes for naturalism. The essential ockerism of the men becomes more apparent as the party degenerates and the alcohol takes over. The critical focus sharpens and the humour becomes more cynical.

On St Valentine's Day 1900, three schoolgirls and a teacher from an exclusive English-style boarding school go missing at the mysterious Hanging Rock in central Victoria. One of the girls is found alive a week later, but the others are never seen again. As morale within the school begins to disintegrate, the headmistress's increasingly incoherent anger is turned towards one student, leading to tragic consequences. Although the police suspect Michael Fitzhubert, a young English aristocrat, and his manservant Albert, who were in the area at the time the girls disappeared, the mystery is never solved. As Paul Byrnes (Australian Screen) notes, the suggested scenarios range from the 'banal and explicable (a crime of passion) to deeply mystical (a crime of nature).'