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Mark Hartley's 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!, which opens July 31 in New York, takes a gleeful look back at the Australian "Ozploitation" films of the 1970s and early '80s, a genre known to most people only for George Miller's post-apocalyptic 1979 road movie Mad Max. Ozploitation movies were the homegrown Australian equivalent of America's grindhouse pictures–gory, sleazy, and made on a shoestring.

The genre was born after a wave of liberalism swept Australia in 1971 and led to the near-overnight relaxation of censorship standards, suddenly allowing filmmakers to shoot just about whatever they wanted. The documentary is a love letter to naked women, psycho drifters, half-baked ideas, nearly unkillable stuntmen, and some astoundingly bad special effects.

Respectable Australian directors, like Peter Weir (eventual director of The Truman Show), made meditative and mature art films.  Others, like director John Lamond-interviewed in the present day with a stripper gyrating on a pole in the background-made Ozploitation pictures, and they packed their movies with as much and gore and frontal nudity as possible.  Not Quite Hollywood could easily be rated NC-17 for the clips alone.

Quentin Tarantino dedicated Kill Bill: Volume One to one of Ozploitation's key directors, Brian Trenchard-Smith. Tarantino appears as a talking head in Not Quite Hollywood, and one of the film's most memorable moments is when he enumerates the questions that an ideal exploitation film should inspire the audience to ask itself:

Am I really seeing this?  
What kind of mind thought this up?  
Did somebody actually think this was an okay thing to put in a movie?
If so, what the fuck was going through their minds when they actually shot it?

Tarantino isn't the only American who shows up to talk Ozploitation. Dennis Hopper, Jamie Lee Curtis, Steve Railsback, and Stacy Keach all went to Australia to appear in low-budget films, and they all appear in Not Quite Hollywood.  On the set of Mad Dog Morgan, Hopper's unhinged behavior so terrified his Aborigine costar that the man disappeared on a four-day walkabout to ask the trees about his tormentor.

Ozploitation movies included sex romps, grisly horror movies, and stunt-heavy action pictures.  "It's a far cry from content that philosophically addresses the human condition," one actress thoughtfully explains, her voice laid over a clip of her younger self, stark naked in some slasher film, covered in blood and vomiting.  We see a stuntman named Grant Page zoom his motorcycle off a high cliff and into the ocean below, where he's knocked unconscious. Several stuntmen, we learn, died on the sets of Ozploitation film.  What's shocking is that more didn't.

Ozploitation filmmakers were, above all, perseverant.  How do you create a baby werewolf for a film?  Put a mouse in a "werewolf fetus suit," obviously.  The mouse is moving too much?  Inject it with a sedative.  The mouse died instantly?  Get another mouse, and this time, use less sedatives.

One gets the feeling that the wild and lurid clips shown in Not Quite Hollywood are the most interesting parts of most of many of the films in question. I did resolve to track down a few, particularly Roadgames, and Next of Kin, two horror movies that Tarantino rhapsodizes about.  But that's not really even the point of Not Quite Hollywood, which is an experience unto itself rather than a brochure for a national cinema.  One comes away from Hartley's documentary thinking what a great time everybody must have had making these movies.  Everybody who lived, that is.

Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! opens Friday, July 31 in New York at Village East.