When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Not Quite Hollywood isn't a great documentary - in some ways the quality of its editing and how the interviews and clips are put together resembles a longer DVD special feature 'making-of' history than a documentary. But it is really fantastic for someone like myself, who is always on the look-see for new and exciting (or just trashy) movies. I was aware of some of the Ozploitation films of the 70's and 80's, mostly through coming across some films of Philippe Mora (The Howling III, Mad Dog Morgan, Return of Captain Invincible, two of those three very good, one not so much), and of course Mad Max, which is like the creme-de-la-creme of the output. But there was more, much more, and if you're into crazy B-movie or just genre entertainment, it gives invaluable lots of new finds - it's like, to quote Superbad, a Ghostbusters Treasure-Trove of Aussie-movies! Not all of the movies look as appealing as they should. The one group that looked underwhelming just from the clips were the sex comedies, which, God bless em, looked like low-rent rip-offs of John Waters movies (i.e. Pink Flamingos), which is saying a lot. It's when the doc gets into the bloody, trashy and actually well-crafted stuff that it gets interesting. Better than that, filmmakers will come up on your radar you may have only heard in passing before. The big one here is Brian Trenchard Smith, who made a career out of just going to town with crazy car crashes, anything-goes horror, and intense action, and as his first film, kung-fu (The Man from Hong Kong, which provides one of the most entertaining sections of the film as *everyone* hates on the lead Asian star). By the time the doc ends, not only will you know Smith's name and how his films look so ballsy, but want to check out most of them as genuine articles of exploitation-fare.Other names are good to know too, like the man who makes Long Weekend, an animal-attack movie that has high production quality, or the movie Patrick by Richard Franklin (an intense admirer of Hitchcock), and written by multiple Ozsploitation writer Everett De Roche. Of course we get Quentin Tarantino expounding his love for so many of these films- and sometimes not so much (the "What is this s***" moment about one film in particular is very funny). But it's the actors and filmmakers and the critics, both the praising and the damning, that give the film a good boost as far as nuggets of the making-of the movies. As a documentary the best it does is to do what many good documentaries do: inform about a subject one doesn't know so much about, with a little history (like Decade Under the Influence early on it talks about the changing times in Australia), and as a guide for movie-geeks it's like Christmas has arrived.

Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation examines how Australia didn't really have a movie industry to call it's own until the beginning of the Seventies, but once they got started the Aussies mostly bypassed making worthy and critically-respectable films, and instead embraced the various genres associated with low budget B movies, churning out sex comedies & skin flicks, horror films and action thrillers. The documentary contains clips and discussion on many Australian films that I've already seen or was aware of - TURKEY SHOOT, SKY PIRATES, SNAPSHOT, RAZORBACK, LOST WEEKEND, PATRICK, THE SURVIVOR, ROAD GAMES, HARLEQUIN, etc (sadly the wannabe sci-fi epic THE TIME GUARDIAN is only represented by a quick glimpse of it's poster) - and a few that I'd not previously heard of, but would now like to track down. FAIR GAME (1985) and THE MAN FROM HONG KONG both look as though they're an absolute blast.There are dozens of interviewees, most of whom are surprisingly candid: Steve Railsback has nothing good to say about TURKEY SHOOT, and the movie's producer admits that due to lack of time and money, live rounds were fired close to actors during some of the action scenes. Jamie Lee Curtis remembers being subjected to a hate campaign while shooting ROAD GAMES, for allegedly taking work away from Australian actresses. Wendy Hughes recalls that after doing a topless scene in one film, most of the reviews discussed the shape of her breasts at length and didn't mention her performance. Everybody involved in MAD DOG MORGAN tells of how Dennis Hopper spent the entire shoot out of his head on drugs (we see behind-the-scenes footage confirming this), and Hopper himself reveals that during production he was arrested for drunk driving and the police doctor told him that based on the amount of alcohol in his bloodstream, he was technically dead.Not Quite Hollywood is a wonderful celebration of Australia's frequently ignored movie output, and is well worth watching.

This is another one of those worryingly fashionable and prominent documentaries that offers plentiful sound-bites set to almost non-stop music, but precious little insight. Like that terribly overrated skateboarding flick Dogtown And Z-Boys, this is a barrage of information that you didn't care to know, delivered by people sometimes visibly salivating at the prospect of recounting a story that isn't really worth telling.Many of these subjects are so rigorously determined to mythologize this period of Aussie film-making, that they end up telling tales that make them look like a smirking misanthropy collective. Wasn't it funny when that actress nearly drowned, just because some schmuck of a director couldn't get the shot that he wanted? How about when Henry Silva, an actor petrified of heights, almost p*ssed himself with fear because a camera crew took him 70ft off the ground without warning him? And that Etc sequence in Patrick? They considered giving the actor real shock therapy! What lovable rogues! What tw*ts.Stir in the endless shrugging off of numerous instances of casual racism and misogyny, and you're left with a pretty empty document of little genuine significance. There are a handful of interesting, level-headed contributors (one of them being an uncharacteristically restrained Quentin Tarantino) but there is no form, structure or analysis of any cultural impact that this movement may have had. Which is a shame, because such analysis may have justified the film's existence. There may well be valuable things to say about this subject, but it'll take a much more ambitious director to do it.

Best documentary I've seen this year. It feels as if these films have been swept under the carpet by a film industry which is overprotective of its image. The Australian film industry is so very narrow-minded and so it is great to see a documentary which has been so brilliantly edited but also used along with the great characters of the industry through the 70's and 80's who make this possible multiple movie preview so entertaining. There is a good mix of local and international actors/producers/directors and there is also contradictory comments and varying disagreements which merely adds to the movie myths. This film is also refreshing as it harks back to a time when the business was far from a business and less stringent with the absence of governing bodies which equates to many broken bodies and lots of bodies on show in terms of nudity. These films make me proud to be Australian. Thank you Mark Hartley. Now will someone just release them on DVD!!