Moriarty’s DVD Shelf! An October Ozploitation Triple Feature! DARK FORCES! THIRST! And PATRICK!

Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here. I’ve got more Fantastic Fest reviews still coming. I have a feeling I’ll chip away at those for a while. One of the films I really adored, though, is the new documentary NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD, which is a loving look back at a whole wave of filmmakers who revitalized the Australian film industry using sex, violence, and a whole lot of stuntmen who seemed perfectly willing to die on camera. One of the net effects of sitting through NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD is that it made me want to immediately see every single film they featured that I haven’t seen already. And while I was at the festival, I mentioned that to Don May, owner and poobah of Synapse Films, a great DVD label that I’ve written about at length here over the years. He smiled and said, “I’ve got a ton of those films coming out.” Back in 2005, he released LONG WEEKEND...



... which I’d never heard of until NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD. I’m going to pick that up at Amoeba, hopefully. In the meantime, though, an envelope showed up about a week after I got back from the festival, containing three different Synapse titles, and I decided to have some buddies over to watch the three of them, all Ozploitation films featured at some point in the documentary, all of them new to me. THIRST was first up, and looking at the cover, I expected something wild and gory and overt:



Actually, though, THIRST is a bit of a headgame. Director Rod Hardy is still working today, mainly on shows like BURN NOTICE and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. He’s primarily known as a TV director, although last year, he did see a theatrical release for DECEMBER BOYS, the period-piece drama about the orphans starring Daniel Radcliffe. THIRST is his only other feature film, and it was all the way back in 1979. Chantal Contouri was a fixture in the Australian film scene from the mid-70s till the early ‘80s, and most of what she did were ALVIN PURPLE films or TV shows. THIRST is a huge role for her. She plays Kate Davis, a successful woman working at an ad agency. She’s being watched, though, but a mysterious group of people who meet to discuss how difficult it’s going to be to break her, how “strong-willed” she seems. But they’re all determined, and they agree that they have to convince her of something. They’re vague about what exactly that is, but David Hemmings is involved, and so is Henry Silva, so you know it’s gonna be bad. They eventually have to kidnap her, and they take her to a remote location, a farm that is sort of like a combination of a mental hospital and a commune. Right about the time they refer to the listless dead-eyed people walking around as “blood cows,” you know what’s up. They’re vampires. And they seem convinced that Kate is one of them, the last in a very powerful bloodline, and that she has to be awoken to her true nature. They need her to drink blood, and it has to be her choice. So they set out to convert her, by any means necessary. That includes extreme psychological torture, where they do their best to push her past the edge of sanity. There’s a bit of a NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET vibe here, and I mean the first film, the great one, the way reality seemed so liquid and disturbing in that film. Because there’s a headgame being played on Kate, it gives Rod Hardy and screenwriter John Pinkney a chance to play that same headgame with the audience. That can be a recipe for pseudo-surrealist garbage in the wrong hands, but this film’s got an undeniable urgency to it. Brian May’s score helps set a distinct mood, and it serves to smooth some of the film’s less polished moves. It’s not always well-acted, and there are sequences that are inelegantly staged, but overall, it’s a smart, strange, genuinely good film that hardly qualifies as “exploitation.” If there was an “auteur” on THIRST, chances are it was Antony I. Ginnane, the producer of the movie. He was a big part of what happened in Australian exploitation cinema, and he has his name on some crazy stuff, like the John Holmes FANTASM series, RACE FOR THE YANKEE ZEPHYR, STRANGE BEHAVIOR (the first produced script by Oscar-winner Bill Condon), TURKEY SHOOT, and THE SURVIVOR, which I saw once years and years ago on some cable channel. He was also the producer on the next film I put in, which was the only one of the three I was familiar with at all before this weekend. PATRICK is famous more for its central image than as a film most people have actually seen. Over the years, I’ve seen pictures of Robert Thompson as Patrick, lying in a hospital bed, unmoving, those piercing eyes of his open and staring dead ahead...



As soon as I put it on and the credits started, I was thrilled because of two names. First was Everett De Roche, the screenwriter. This guy is a huge part of what I love about crazy Aussie cinema. He wrote RAZORBACK, which I quite liked, and he also wrote ROADGAMES, which I flat out love. So knowing that, I was hoping for something akin to that. Especially since PATRICK was directed by the second name that excited me, Richard Franklin, who was the man at the helm of ROADGAMES. Franklin’s famous as a disciple of Alfred Hitchcock. He spent a fair amount of time with him, he studied him, he was able to bounce his theories and ideas off of the great director in person. Franklin’s PSYCHO II is one of the single finest acts of Hitchcock scholarship and criticism in any media, print or film or otherwise. If I’d known that PATRICK was his film, I would have seen it years ago. The film’s a cross of HALLOWEEN and CARRIE, the story of Patrick (Thompson), a young man who murders his mother and father in a bathtub, who then goes into a sort of hypercatatonia. He’s dropped into a hospital, where everyone assumes he’s a permanent vegetable, checked out and never set to return. Susan Penhaligon is the one who’s got the really tough job here as Kathy, the new nurse who becomes convinced that Patrick is far more aware and active than he’s letting on. She begins to communicate with Patrick at the hospital, while at home, she sees evidence that someone is moving and destroying things by remote. Patrick’s romantic obsession with her begins to manifest as harm to the people around her. It’s a slow burn with a lot of weird heaped on along the way, and Franklin tightens the screws expertly. He builds mood in this film expertly, and it pays off with a few huge jolts that work even though one was ruined for me by NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD. Once again, Brian May wrote the score for this one, and he’s a big part of why it works. Franklin’s not looking to gross you out (although he does include a few moments that the ASPCA is sure to loathe) and he’s not looking to shock you into being scared. Like THIRST, this is a film that is dead set on weirding your shit out. That particular style of moody psychological horror... that seems to be what Australia can lay claim to as unique. And May’s music is as vital and ubiquitous to the Aussie scene as Goblin and Morricone were to a certain moment in Italian cinema. Indeed, he also scored the final film in our round-up of Synapse releases, which turned out to be the biggest “what the fuck did I just see?” of the three to our great delight. Like Franklin and like Hardy, Simon Wincer cut his teeth in Australian TV before moving on to films like THE PHANTOM, OPERATION DUMBO DROP, LIGHTING JACK, FREE WILLY, QUIGLEY DOWN UNDER, D.A.R.Y.L. and all sorts of YOUNG INDIANA JONES. He started working in the early ‘70s, so by the time he got to features, he was rarin’ to go. HARLEQUIN was his second feature film, and it appears on DVD under its US release title, DARK FORCES. Working from another Everett De Roche script, this is one crazy ride, and I have to confess something: I got duped a bit. And so did two of my friends, who must also confess to having been taken in. See, we watched the whole film and never once recognized who was playing Gregory Wolfe. I’ve seen probably dozens of things starring this actor, including some truly iconic work that I saw young, and yet when I was looking at the character of Wolfe in this film, I assumed that whoever was playing it had to have been a Doug Henning/David Copperfield contemporary, but Australian. All three of us bought it. “This must have been his TERROR TRAIN,” one of my buddies said. We never realized even when the credits rolled that we were watching Robert JESUS OF NAZARETH Powell. Not once. I thought this guy was going to be like the stuntman movie star lead in STUNT ROCK, some guy from Australia who maybe made a couple of films and who hasn’t really worked since. I thought this was some one-off great performance, and of course it turns out I’m watching someone familiar doing something unlike any of their other work. The reason I didn’t know it was him, of course, is because he is ACTING HIS ASS OFF. It’s a crazy performance, totally dedicated and turned up to fever pitch all the way through. Wolfe is basically Bob Fosse-as-Satan, a magician who worms his way into the lives of a powerful American political family. David Hemmings, a boozy ruined shell of the guy who appeared only fourteen years earlier in BLOWUP, plays Nick Rast, a sort of Greg Stillson/Senator Thorne style politician, poised to seize power in order to please players lurking offstage in shadow. Rast has made his peace with being a compromised man, but at the start of the film, he’s unable to do anything about the only crisis in his life that matters: the lingering death of his son Alex (Mark Spain) by leukemia, and the complete collapse of his marriage to Sandra (Carmen Duncan). Sounds like a real rollercoaster ride, doesn’t it?



That cover... ahhh, it only begins to hint at the delights in store for you with DARK FORCES. From the opening nightmare birthday party, where Powell shows up in the full Pennywise doing close-up magic (I want to watch it again to see if Powell actually does any of the onscreen stuff, or if it’s all clever hand doubles), to the bizarro late night laying on of hands that leads to Sandra transferring all of her sorrow and pain and fear and loneliness into a singular love for Wolfe, to the scene that’s pictured on that cover, to the dinner party where Wolfe appears in eye makeup that makes him look like a gay Skeksis, DARK FORCES is the gift that keeps on giving. Cult leader phobia was at an all-time high right around 1980, and with good reason. Some scary shit was being done by people following other people, and the things these guys were doing and saying to inspire that fervor seemed crazy from the outside. Yet they were working. Maybe it was just the fear from what was happening in society in general, and that anxiety is what led certain kinds of people to look for answers of any kind, in anyone. DARK FORCES plays its characters straight, even when someone’s busy shooting lightning out of their mouth. Powell’s performance is so robust and outsized that some people will hate it from the very start. Before I looked this film up on IMDb and realized how completely duped I’d been, I already liked the performance. I thought it was a lucky accident, this gem I’d be able to feel like I discovered. And instead, he’s a huge movie star I should recognize and don’t. Overall, great line-up, and Synapse has tracked down the directors (whenever possible, Richard Franklin R.I.P.) for commentary, along with Ginnane himself. I can’t wait to see what other Ozploitation films might show up from Synapse. So far, May’s three for three in terms of what he picked up, and so I’m recommending the whole damn triple feature. They all go on sale on October 28th, and they’ll make for a very creepy Halloween for, hopefully, discerning horror fans this year.

Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles