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.

'Alice awakens in a psychiatric hospital believing she is the daughter of a 16th century executioner. Is she insane, or has a portal opened to a past life where she and her outlaw lover are hunted by a corrupt noble and his henchmen? What is the true agenda of Paul, the handsome young doctor who befriends her? Why will intelligence agencies kill to possess her? Are cosmic forces in play to change both past and future? The Headsman's Daughter is a thrilling genre mash-up in novel form. Think Games Of Thrones meets The Bourne Identity on Freaky Friday. It's a ripping yarn for progressives, a sardonic take on agitprop fiction that explores themes of political corruption, social change, justice, destiny, and timeless love. It's an action packed roller coaster ride with surprising twists and turns along the way, plus a bit of metaphysics thrown in for good measure. This is the first in a series of adventures for Alice, an 18 year old girl, both pure and fierce of heart...'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'My one hour documentary World Of Kung Fu (1973) was a ratings success for the Seven Network, so I quickly sold a sequel concept to Channel Nine, this time 75 minutes for a 90 minute slot. The film would follow Australian stuntman Grant Page going to Hong Kong to learn more about kung fu, and to find who would succeed the late great Bruce Lee as Asia's top martial arts star.

A one page sizzle sheet, and my relationship with the Nine Network (for whom I had previously been the on-air promo producer before starting my own production company) was enough to get me a verbal acquisition deal from Nine's Len Mauger. In those days an executive's word was his bond.' (Introduction)

See also:

'Battling It Out Kung Fu Style', Australian Women's Weekly, 1 May 1974, p.21/

'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)

An American/Australian co-production, this series was a revival of the original 1964 - 1967 series Flipper.

The show's production is sharply divided between seasons one and two on one side and seasons three and four on the other.

Seasons one and two aired in first-run syndication in the US, as American television networks turned away from funding comparatively expensive one-hour dramas in the late 1980s and 1990s. These two seasons were made in Australia and took advantage of local directors and other crew, but, notably, the script-writers were exclusively American (as far as they have been traced).

For seasons three and four, Flipper left first-run syndication and aired in the US on the new network PAX TV (now Ion Television). These two seasons were also made in Australia and directed by Australians, but for the first time, they also used Australian script-writers: of the writers who have been traced for seasons three and four, all of the season three writers and the majority of the season four writers are Australian.

For full information on the script-writers, see the list of episodes on the film details page of this record.

After the fall of Tobruk, an American tank unit and Allied soldiers meet in the Sahara Desert, where they find themselves defending a well from German soldiers.

Something capable of defying gravity is killing the women of Sydney, and then removing their eyes. The only man who can stop the crimes is an innocent bystander who shares a psychic link with the killer. But how can he stop the police from suspecting that he is involved?

American revival of the 1966 television program, but filmed in Australia (largely in Queensland), and making extensive use of Australian directors and script-writers: eight of the twenty-two writers and five of the nine directors are Australian. As with the earlier version (and the later film incarnations), the program made extensive use of high-tech gadgetry that often crossed the line from science into science fiction.

A martial arts expert traces his kidnapped girlfriend to a man holed up in a deserted power station wired with enough explosives to destroy half of Perth.

A martial arts expert goes up against the crime boss who killed his partner.

'A 14-year-old American orphan living in a small Australian town explores a lake looking for the underwater monster of Aboriginal legend and meets disaster.'

(Source: National Film and Sound Archive website)

'Jenny, a 10-year-old, is caught between the conflicting emotions of her mother Carol and Carol's lover, Lindsay.'

Source: Screen Australia.

An attempt to re-invoke the popularity that police procedurals had enjoyed a decade earlier, Special Squad was the most expensive program produced in Australia up to 1985 (at $150,000 per episode), yet received such lukewarm ratings that Channel Ten chose not to commission a second series.

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series,

it was good to watch, with expert stunt work and special effects. With well-paced narratives, intelligently and nicely worked out situations and plenty of emphasis on the villains and victims, Special Squad was just as watchable and entertaining as Homicide had been in its last series.

According to Moran, the failure of Special Squad lay both in its difference from and its similarity to Homicide. The novelty (of Australian accents and Australian locations) that had helped make Homicide so successful was no longer in play, and 'the sight of tough men (on both sides of the law) made the program [Special Squad] seem very old-fashioned. In addition, the plethora of other Australian dramas on air at the time gave viewers more than enough alternatives.'

Two expert BMX riders and their friend Judy become entangled with a group of bank robbers.

The Australian government hires two Vietnam vets (now working as stuntmen) to raid a Filipino racketeer's island stronghold and steal incriminating paperwork.

Like much of Trenchard-Smith's work from this period–including The Stuntmen (1973) and Stunt Rock (1978)–the focus of this film lay more in the stuntwork than in the plot: the lead actor, Grant Page, was a significant Australian film and television stuntman in the 1970s and 1980s.

'When Inspector Fang's charge, a Chinese drug-smuggler, is murdered before he extradites him back to Hong Kong, he decides to stay in Australia to crack a narcotics ring. '

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 27/6/2013)