While Peter Weir and Fred Schepisi were putting Australian cinema on the map in the 1970s with films like Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Devil’s Playground, an amazing underworld of exploitation cinema was also happening Down Under full of sex and violence, exuberantly captured by director Mark Hartley in his slam bang documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! Like his more recent ode to Filipino exploitation flicks, Machete Maidens Unleashed, Hartley has found the perfect formula for honoring the less honorable world cinema. Tracing Australia’s growth from sexploitation through stuntploitation and finally peaking with George Miller’s masterful Mad Max and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (known in the U.S. as The Road Warrior). With a plethora of wall-to-wall clips and both informative and entertaining talking heads telling the story including Quentin Tarantino, George Lazenby, Brian Trenchard-Smith, John Waters, and Richard Franklin, this movie is an absolute blast.

What we see
and what we seem
are but a dream...
a dream within a dream.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is one of the first Australian films to break through to an international audience, and it is also one of director Peter Weir's earliest and most important works. Weir would later go on to direct such giants as The Year of Living Dangerously, Dead Poet's Society, and The Truman Show. Picnic at Hanging Rock, mysterious and dream-like, confusing and open-ended, provides a glimpse of this prolific director's early vision.

The film begins with scenes from Appleyard College, an all girls school in a rural part of Australia. It is here that the ethereal realm of Victorian ladies comes to life. French lace, sunlit boudoirs, a row of girls tying their corsets, each scene is treated and framed almost as if it were a painting by Waterhouse or Botticelli, the woodwind driven soundtrack eerily luring the viewer into this delicate world of beauty.