Ever since Mark Hartley’s 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood, Ozploitation has become a term to conjure with. Hartley aimed to shine a light on a neglected area of Australian cinema: genre films, horror, sexploitation, action thrillers. The makers of these films felt themselves marginalised within the local industry, although they intended to make commercial films rather than the often-essentially-arthouse works of “social realism” or period/historical literary adaptations that they saw as taking the lion’s share of the attention and funding. Nowadays the pendulum has swung the other way. Nowadays for a film of the 1970s and 1980s to receive a Blu-ray release, it seems that you have to pass it off as Ozploitation, other than a few standard classics like Picnic at Hanging Rock. Meanwhile, other leading films of the cinema revival of the 1970s which can’t be labelled Ozploitative haven’t progressed beyond DVDs and/or SD streams, and in some cases are currently AWOL for homeviewing. This current box set gathers together three Ozploitation deep cuts. You certainly can’t call any of them an unsung classic, far from it. However aficionados will welcome the chance to see them in better quality than they would have been able to since their original limited cinema releases (for two out of the three).

These three films reflect a change in the Australian film industry at the time. Previously, genre films like these played at drive-ins, but by the end of the 1970s that market was in decline and home video was taking off. In 1980, Division 10BA of the Income Tax Assessment Act was introduced. This allowed investment in Australian films and you could then deduct 150% of your investment from your tax. While this certainly increased the number of films made in Australia, 10BA was a mixed blessing. Certification had to be obtained to show that the film’s content was sufficiently Australian to qualify. The films had to be exhibited before the end of the financial year they were produced in. However, due to so many films being in production at the same time, casts and crews were in short supply and prices went up. With so many investment companies entering the industry, it was clear that many films were being made essentially as tax write-offs and quality was very much a secondary consideration. Films might have been still shot in 35mm (for the most part) with a view to a possible cinema release, but many barely received one or had none at all, finding themselves most widely available on the small screen as a VHS tape.

Chris (Lou Brown) is a filmmaker. With his girlfriend Sarah (Jennifer Cluff) he is making a video documentary on music promoter Dominic (David Clendenning), though he suspects Dominic of involvement in snuff movies. At a party on Dominic’s yacht, a model is killed and Dominic worries that it might have been filmed. So Chris and Sarah are in danger...

Final Cut, released in 1980 (known as Death Games in the USA), predated the 10BA era. It was in fact the first production to be funded by the Queensland Film Corporation (QFC). It was something of a surprise that a state as socially conservative as Queensland should fund a film such as this, containing violence and nudity (again, all female, apart from a brief Lou Brown arse shot), but maybe the commercial imperative won out. There was also the motive of promoting the state’s attractions, in this case the Gold Coast. The film touches a further exploitation base with an artily-shot lesbian scene. Whether or not Final Cut’s home state approved of the result is unknown.

The film was shot in Surfer’s Paradise. Ross Dimsey was the director. He also rewrote the script, for which he is co-credited with Jonathan Dawson. The latter receives an “original story” credit, as he wrote it as a stage play originally. Dimsey began his career as an assistant director on Stork (1971), the “ocker comedy” directed by Tim Burstall which was one of the earliest commercial successes of the 1970s Australian Film Revival. He was the writer of the rather abject sex comedies Fantasm (1976) and Fantasm Comes Again (1977), the latter under the pseudonym Robert Derriere. As a director, he made two short films and a TV film of a stage production of Jack Hibberd’s hit play Dimboola. (The latter can be found on some DVD editions of the 1979 film Dimboola, which John Duigan directed.) In the cinema at feature length, Dimsey had previously written and directed Blue Fire Lady (1977), a rare family film produced by Ozploitation specialist Antony Ginnane. Other than second unit on Kangaroo (1986, reuniting him with Tim Burstall) and Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train (1987), Dimsey has not directed another cinema feature since Final Cut. He continued in the film and television industry as a producer up to 1999. There is one future bigger name in the credits: first assistant director Scott Hicks, who in 1996 directed Geoffrey Rush to an Oscar in Shine.

You can see why Final Cut never set the world alight. There’s not much in the way of suspense and a second-string cast doesn’t amount to much. The Gold Coast locations look nice in Ron Johanson’s cinematography. After a brief cinema outing, Final Cut went to video in Australia. It appeared on UK video in 1983, before the Video Recordings Act became law. As it has never been certified by the BBFC, it went out of circulation once certification became mandatory.

Gordon Mason (Chard Hayward) works as a gardener. He is employed by actress Marie (Deborah Coulls), with whom he is obsessed despite her treating him with contempt. An altercation results in his raping her and then murdering her by holding her head underwater in a fish tank. He also murders a neighbour who witnesses him trying to hide her body. Marie’s sister Jenny (Louise Howitt) arrives at Marie’s beach house, puzzled to find her missing…

Lady, Stay Dead hits its Ozploitation beats straight away. Even before the opening credits have finished we’ve had full nudity from in front and behind. Female, needless to say: the first time we see Gordon, shortly afterwards, he might be wandering around alone in his flat (only companion, a blow-up doll) but he’s in his underpants. Writer/director Terry Bourke is less than subtle by showing Gordon apparently masturbating while spying on Marie on the beach, intercut with shots of naked women, one tied to a chair, presumably previous victims. Gordon would likely now be called an incel, obsessed with a woman and turning murderous when thwarted. In the light of this, and with the sensibilities of four decades later, the film’s theme song, “Loving from a Distance”, seems particularly tone-deaf.

Bourke began his career as a journalist and continued as such alongside his filmmaking career, with a column in Cinema Papers. There is more about the films he directed in my discussion of the extras on this disc below, but of those who worked in the commercial Australian film industry in the 1970s, he’s not a name to conjure with. His most interesting film was Night of Fear (1972), more about which below, but one interesting film is one more than John D. Lamond, say, ever made. Other than a children’s film, Little Boy Lost (1978), which he took over from the original director and rewrote, Bourke’s films are squarely in exploitation mode. Even a shot of Marie’s corpse has her in a dress transparent enough to show her braless breasts.

The second half of Lady, Stay Dead turns into a home-invasion thriller, with just two people on screen joined by a further two later. The film was shot in 35mm and Ray Henman’s cinematography is slick and not unattractive. However, a cinema release was not forthcoming and Lady, Stay Dead went straight to video in Australia. It did the same in the UK.

Computer expert Ed Ballinger (Gary Day) is confined to his apartment following an accident, surrounded by the advanced technology he has devised. He is regularly visited by girlfriend Cindy (Penny Downie) and nurse Jane (Kim Deacon). But he soon suspects that his upstairs neighbour Stollier (John Ewart) has murdered his wife, and he enlists Cindy and Jane to help him investigate. But Stollier is in league with businessmen aiming to gain control of Ed’s advanced computer...

While Lady, Stay Dead and Final Cut are basically thrillers, Crosstalk aims for something futuristic, though that it’s in the nature of most film futures that they don’t last, are of their time. More than forty years later, the technology on display dates the film badly, as does the computer font seen in the opening and closing credits. While I have just distinguished this film from the others in this set, Crosstalk does hit suspense-thriller beats with a storyline reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. We have a protagonist (confined to his apartment due to an accident) who thinks he may have witnessed a murder, and enlists the help of his girlfriend to investigate. Compared to Lady, Stay Dead and Final Cut, Crosstalk is relatively chaste and non-violent, but does earn its M rating due to a scene involving the gruesome contents of a washing machine.

Made on a higher budget than the other two, Crosstalk stretches to being shot in Scope and being one of the earliest Australian films with a Dolby Stereo soundtrack. (The very first was Mad Max 2, the previous year.) Vincent Monton’s cinematography is suitably glossy. But widescreen and stereo sound went for very little as after a limited cinema run (one screen each in Melbourne and Sydney) Crosstalk went to video, which is where no doubt the majority of people first saw it. In the UK, Crosstalk came out on a pre-Video Recordings Act VHS in 1983. Unlike the other two films in this set, Crosstalk was shown on British television. Its first outing was in 1984 as part of one of several Australian film seasons BBC2 put on in the 1980s, when it apparently attracted an audience of six million. It had two further showings in 1987 and 1988, both on BBC1. All three showings would have been panned and scanned.

Crosstalk is most notable for its production history. The film began as a script written in 1979 by Keith Salvat, originally called High-Rise. Salvat had previously directed a short film, Sacrifice (1970), and a feature, Private Collection (1971), which marked the cinema feature debut of Pamela Stephenson, later to become better known in the UK than in her home country, especially on television. High-Rise (nothing to do with the J.G. Ballard novel nor Ben Wheatley’s 2015 film of it) was avowedly influenced by Hitchcock’s film, though Salvat aimed to explore a theme of how technology could isolate us. In the early 1980s, Salvat sought funding for the project, now called Wall to Wall (which still survives as the name of the production company, Wall to Wall Pty Ltd) and worked on the script with input from producer Ross Matthews. With the arrival of 10BA, the New South Wales Film Corporation financed the film to the tune of A$1.2 million. At this point, Matthews left the production to work on Phillip Noyce’s film Heatwave, which he had been developing at the same time (he is still credited as executive producer), and Errol Sullivan took his place. The rash of 10BA projects caused prices to go up, but the film’s budget stayed the same. Salvat began production and worked for eighteen days, mainly shooting exteriors and the videotaped footage seen on the computer monitors. The film was shot in Sydney: there are many shots of the harbour, including the Bridge and the Opera House, from Ed’s apartment window.

Just before shooting was to begin on the large main set, Matthews and Sullivan summoned Salvat to a meeting, where he was informed that he was being removed from the production, citing budget overruns. First assistant director Mark Egerton took over, and production was shut down while he rewrote the script (which is credited to him and Linda Lane, with Dennis Whitburn credited for additional material). It should be said that accounts of what happened vary between the people concerned. Salvat took legal advice but was told that his only recourse was an injunction unless he spent more money than he had available. Salvat did have his name taken off the film and had it be retitled, to the present title, He took back his original screenplay but to this date it has never been made. Salvat has directed commercials since, but has never made another feature. In his book The Avocado Plantation, David Stratton, who interviewed Salvat, Matthews, Sullivan and lead actor Gary Day (more of which below, among the extras in this set), says that Salvat felt he had been blacklisted. The film is derivative and not always coherent and no real testimony to the efforts of its makers.

Ozploitation Rarities Volume One is released by Umbrella Entertainment as three Blu-ray discs, each in its own case inside a cardboard slipcase. The discs are encoded for all regions. The set carries a R 18+ rating due to Lady, Stay Dead, while the other two features carry the advisory M rating. The only one of the three to have been submitted to the BBFC was Lady, Stay Dead, which was passed for homeviewing uncut at 18 in 1992. That was in a shortened version of 88:46. If you take PAL speed-up into account translates to approximately 92 minutes at cinema and Blu-ray speed of twenty-four frames per second, when the transfer on this Blu-ray runs 94:36. I don’t know what was in the missing two and a half minutes or thereabouts, though you have to wonder if the distributor removed things the BBFC would be unlikely to pass then, most likely the rape scene though it’s not especially graphic.

All three films were shot in 35mm in colour, Crosstalk with anamorphic lenses. Lady, Stay Dead is presented on this Blu-ray in a ratio of 1.78:1, opened up slightly from the most-likely-intended 1.85:1. Final Cut is in 1.85:1 and Crosstalk is in 2.35:1. Given the 35mm sources, all look fine, with an intended sharp and glossy look certainly evident, and grain natural and filmlike. Crosstalk’s transfer is 2K, approved by Vincent Monton.

The soundtrack for Lady, Stay Dead was originally mono, and it’s rendered here as LPCM 2.0. Final Cut was also mono, and that’s DTS-HD MA 2.0. Crosstalk’s Dolby Stereo sound mix is rendered as LPCM 2.0, which plays in surround, mainly used for the music.

English subtitles for the hard-of-hearing are available on the three features only. There are a number of glitches, such as a good few examples of “(indistinct)”, especially in Crosstalk, and some errors. For example, in Final Cut, we have “indifference to our guests” instead of “in deference to our guests”, and Crosstalk has “faulty breaks” as the cause of Ed’s car accident and “see here” for “see, hear”.

FINAL CUT:

Commentary with Mike Williams and Shayne Armstrong
Producer Williams is interviewed by Shayne Armstrong, a screenwriter and a Queenslander. Armstrong outs himself as an Ozploitation fan from the outset and indeed rates Final Cut more highly than anyone else I’ve come across, including the film’s director (see below). Williams seems to demur at some points, though he is relatively favourable towards the film he produced. He says he feels better about it now than he did at the time. They talk about the different acting styles on display, Lou Brown naturalistic and David Clendinning more theatrical. Williams reveals that at one point the film was to be the pilot for a series, with some sequel ideas developed, but this never happened. The film’s investors were keen that the film not receive a R rating, so the nudity should not be full-frontal. (In fact there is a full-frontal shot, but not in a sexual context.) Blake Edwards’s then-recent 10 was considered the benchmark and like that film Final Cut did receive a M in Australia. More of its time is some discussion of which actresses were willing to disrobe (“great body”, Williams comments) and which weren’t. In Narelle Johnson’s case it was the latter, due to pressure from her then boyfriend, the actor Bill Hunter.

Oz Voyeurs (11:04)
This video essay by Andrew Mercado is new for this release. Despite the title, this is more an overview of the three films in this set, but he does note that they share the theme of voyeurism, dropping the name of Brian De Palma’s Body Double along the way. Mercado starts with the film on whose disc this item is on. Final Cut was the inaugural production of the Queensland Film Corporation and Mercado expresses surprise that such an Ozploitative piece (M-rated though) was made in what had been historically the most censorious state or territory in Australia. Thanks to the conservative premier of the state, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who was in office from 1968 to 1987 (Mercado goes further, calling him fascist), Queensland frequently banned films available in the rest of the country, changed ratings when they did pass them, and forced certain magazines to produce state-specific issues. However, Mercado suggests that one attraction of Final Cut was to serve as a promotion for the state and the Gold Coast in particular, with much of it filmed in the newly-built Golden Gate apartment building.

Other than this, Mercado concentrates on the cast of the three films, often mentioning their television work, from which we see extracts. Jennifer Cluff (Final Cut) had played a leading role in the 1973 miniseries Seven Little Australians, for example.  Mercado talks a little about the 10BA era of which these films were a part, acknowledges how Crosstalk’s once cutting edge technology now dates the film, and speculates that body doubles might have been used for some of the nude shots in Lady, Stay Dead. Finally, it’s usual for the makers of video essays like this to come across as experts in the films in question, with no doubt many viewings under their belts, but Mercado freely admits he hadn’t seen any of the films in this set until recently.

Not Quite Hollywood interview with Ross Dimsey (2:05)
Given the running time, it’s clear that Dimsey doesn’t have a lot to say about the film he directed. He says that he was approached to be the director and so he did, as one of the few non-Queenslanders in the crew, and feels he did the best he could with what he had, especially a very low budget. He calls the film a “mess” and wonders if the film is the reason why he hasn’t directed again. As of this writing, he is still with us at age eighty-one.

The VHS Experience (82:25)
This is how most people originally saw Final Cut, in 4:3 open-matte on VHS in that format’s low resolution. To be picky, if you were watching this on PAL VHS then, in Australia or the UK, it would run about four minutes shorter as on this disc this item is transferred at twenty-four frames a second rather than PAL’s twenty-five. There is an opening explanatory caption.

Stills gallery(1:51)
Self-navigating, though you can advance via chapter stops. Here we have stills (colour and black and white), some front-of-house cards, a press kit, a short feature/review, and some VHS sleeves, including a German one which retitles the film as Ticket to Hell.

Trailer (2:22)
A not-especially short trailer clearly aimed at the nascent Ozploitation market, with a fair amount of topless nudity.

LADY, STAY DEAD

Chard Hayward interview with Andrew Mercado (12:40)
An audio-only item, which plays over an illustrative still for the film. Like a lot of people on this release, Hayward remembers Terry Bourke as a larger-than-life character. Hayward considers him a better director (on the technical side of the job) than he was a writer, and he’s not the only person to comment on his unhealthy lifestyle, living pretty much entirely on Big Macs. As Lady, Stay Dead was mostly shot at night, a lot of Bundaberg rum was drunk, which may well have violated on-set rules in the Australian film industry.

Not Quite Hollywood interview with Roger Ward (6:54)
You know where you are when Ward begins by describing Bourke as “producer, director, writer, egotistical bastard...friend… He considered himself a brother to me. I didn’t consider him a brother. He considered me one.” Ward sees Bourke as a “battler”, an Australian self-stereotype through the ages, and a better writer than director, especially in his original career as a journalist. He repeats the story of Deborah Coulls nearly drowning because Bourke didn’t call cut when her head was submerged in a fish tank.

Interview with John Hipwell (28:03)
This audio interview with associate producer Hipwell was carried out by Paul Harris for the Australian Media Oral History Project in 2022. Presumably part of a longer interview as it ends very abruptly, this concentrates on Hipwell’s work with Bourke, which comprised two features, Lady, Stay Dead and Brothers (1982). Again, we have a mixed picture of Bourke, with Hipwell mentioning that Bourke’s past as a semiprofessional boxer gave him a vaguely threatening aspect. He also alleges that Bourke’s company Casting Couch was aptly named. Hipwell considers Bourke to be a great technical director, less good with actors.

The D.W. Griffith of Ozploitation (17:52)
Paul Harris again, narrating an overview of Terry Bourke’s film career, with plenty of clips, some of them from the trailers. The first was the 1968 black and white Sampan, which had some censorship issues due to nudity. We also see some of Bourke’s work on the TV series Spyforce. Night of Fear (1972) was originally intended for TV as a pilot for an anthology series called Fright (which is still reflected in the opening credits), but the ABC passed on it. The film, which has no spoken dialogue (just grunts and screams for the most part) was originally banned by the Australian censor. It was eventually certified and gained a cinema release despite being just over fifty minutes long. A gruesome horror film of a kind not found in Australian cinema before this, it remains Bourke’s most interesting film. Most of the rest of his films are hard to make many claims for, and to be fair Harris doesn’t try very hard. Inn of the Damned, despite its lush photography and impressive cast, is poor. As for Plugg, about a sleazy detective agency, I’ll leave the last word to critic Brian McFarlane who named it the worst Australian film ever made, despite strong competition. (It should be said that the clips from Plugg here and in Not Quite Hollywood are in better shape than the ropey-looking master Umbrella released on DVD.) Harris pays some attention to Bourke’s journalism and to some unmade projects, such as Crocodile, which clashed with the US production Alligator. His later cinema films were the children’s film Little Boy Lost (1978), Lady, Stay Dead and Brothers, the latter two going straight to video. Brothers was Bourke’s final feature film; his work for television later in the 1980s isn’t mentioned. Bourke died in 2002 at the age of sixty-two.

Terry Bourke trailer reel (27:10)
Trailers for most of Bourke’s feature films, one after the other. This item has just the one chapter stop, so the only way you have to reach a particular trailer is to fast-forward. In order, we have Sampan, Noon Sunday, Night of Fear, Inn of the Damned, Plugg, Little Boy Lost and Lady, Stay Dead. Sources vary: that for Little Boy Lost is clearly from a VHS copy. Noon Sunday is curious: after some stills, Bourke talks to camera about his new film, and finally we see some excerpts from it. The narration for the Little Boy Lost trailer is sung.

The VHS experience (94:50)
After an initial caption, you can recapture that early 1980s feeling, in VHS resolution and in 4:3. My pedantic comments about frame-rate apply here as much as they do with Final Cut.

Stills gallery (2:54)
A self-navigating gallery featuring stills, some frame enlargements and posters, including Italian and German ones.

Trailer (3:32)
In case you missed it in the trailer reel, here it is again, though this transfer’s colour is rather more washed out.

CROSSTALK:

Shooting Hitchcock Downunder (13:23)
This is an interview with cinematographer Vincent Monton, who begins by saying that he was the DP on two Australian films inspired by Rear Window. That said, one of them, like Hitchcock’s original is mostly confined to an apartment, while the other is set outside on the Australian roads. The latter was of course Roadgames, directed by Hitchcock devotee Richard Franklin. Monton talks about both films and the different approaches he took to shooting them, though both were shot anamorphic. Both films had scheduling problems due to perhaps over-ambitious schedules, which in the case of Crosstalk resulted in production issues detailed above. He talks well of Mark Egerton, who had a reputation as one of the best first assistant directors in Australia, though he points out that it was unusual for first assistants to move on to directing (and in this case, rewriting the script as well), as they more usually became producers. Monton talks about the intended hi-tech look of Crosstalk, using a lot of neon and fluorescent lighting. He also points out that at that time Australian was known for period dramas, so modern SF-tinged thrillers like this were unusual.

Rear Window Meets 2001 (12:50)
A visual essay by Stephen Vagg, tracing two influences on Crosstalk – three in fact, of which more in a moment. Rear Window at the time had been out of circulation for about a decade, but its influence was felt by certain directors who had broken through in the past few years. Vagg mentions Richard Franklin and Brian De Palma. Rear Window was based on a Cornell Woolrich short story, and Vagg teases out another connection with Franklin, who made Cloak & Dagger from a Woolrich story previously filmed in 1949 as The Window. Cloak & Dagger and Franklin’s previous film, the Hitchcock sequel Psycho II, were scripted by Tom Holland, who went on to become a director himself. Another Hitchcock influencee was John Carpenter, especially with Someone’s Watching Me!, made for TV, and Halloween.

On to 2001, with the connection with Crosstalk being the computer. Vagg rounds up other films with possibly sentient computers, such as Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) and Demon Seed (1977). Up to this point, Australian science fiction had been mainly low-tech (The Cars That Ate Paris, Mad Max) so Crosstalk was something new. And the third influence was the paranoid conspiracy thriller, which came to the fore in the 1970s with such films, either based on fact or pure fiction, as The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men. Their influence was also felt in such Australian films as The Chain Reaction and Harlequin (both 1980) and, inspired by the same events, The Killing of Angel Street (1981) and Heatwave (1982).

Not Quite Hollywood interview with Ross Matthews (3:57)
In 2008, executive producer Matthews talks briefly about Crosstalk, which he tried to finance in the USA before 10BA enabled the film to come about. He blames the film’s production problems on inexperience and acknowledges that the film was not commercially successful. However, he notes it had six million viewers on a UK television broadcast. He points out that a cultural cringe applied in Australia. An arthouse film, if it was not successful, could be excused as a brave try, but a commercial project would be heavily criticised if it failed.

Archival interviews with Mark Egerton, Ross Matthews and Chris Neill (24:08)
These are three interviews from television at the time, with the 4:3 frame windowboxed on this Blu-ray transfer. The first two come from the show on Channel Ten hosted by long-running television film presenter Bill Collins, who in his time, before David (Stratton) and Margaret (Pomeranz) came along later in the decade, was the face of Australian television film programming, in much the same way as Siskel and Ebert were in the USA and Barry Norman was in the UK, for those of us of a certain age. I spell this out as there’s no mention of it on the disc or the packaging for this release, and I doubt that everyone buying it will be an Australian old enough to remember the early 1980s. There are also no chapter stops on this item, so the only way to reach the later two interviewees is to fast-forward.

First up is Mark Egerton, then Ross Matthews follows at 12:24. Collins brings up the fact that Rear Window was then unavailable (which he attributes to a rights issue with the Cornell Woolrich estate, though it was as much to do Hitchcock having the rights to this and four others of his films). Egerton talks about having to rewrite the script after Keith Salvat was removed, partly due to Penny Downie’s availablity. Not being an opera fan, he attributes the use in the film of Lakmé, which he calls Russian (it’s actually French), to editor Sara Bennett. He also talks about the role of a first assistant director. Matthews refers to the actual production period being fraught and very busy but post-production being calmer, then comes the promotion. I’m not of a nationality to have seen Collins’s show, but from these extracts it seems it treated its subject intelligently and assumed the same from the audience, which is certainly not the case with other film programmes.

At 18:57, we move to a news item where reporter Michelle Schofield talks to the film’s composer Chris Neal, seen at his synchroniser. He talks that most of his task in Crosstalk was to be sinister, and he praises the possibilities of the synthesiser, while acknowledging the use of human musicians, whether they be soloists, a chamber quartet or a full orchestra.

Keith Salvat interview (31:55)
Audio only, over an illustration from the film poster, in which Salvat is interviewed by David Stratton. This is a very detailed testimony of what must have been a traumatic (and, he acknowledges, career-affecting) experience from Salvat. He is frank about some of his colleagues though still calm. After he began shooting the film, it came as a surprise to him to be told that he would be replaced, the production temporarily shut down and the script rewritten and a new director appointed – but not, to his further surprise, an actual director but a first assistant who had never directed before. The clause in his contract which was invoked referred to his going over budget.

The VHS experience (81:39)
As before, the VHS version of the film, with an explanatory caption, again playing at the non-PAL speed of 24 fps. This was the only way most people were able to see the film at the time, and it shows how things have moved on in over forty years that a low-res image like this, cropped from Scope to 4:3, and with mono sound, was par for the course. But that’s how we watched many films in the 1980s as there wasn’t any other option.

Trailer (2:17)
Extended trailer (1:31)
Both from the original release, though for “extended” read “more voiceover” as that one is actually shorter. Neither have any dialogue from the film, and the longer one has a narration at the end which says, “Only the computer saw the murder and liked what it saw.” The shorter version has narration throughout.

Booklet
Umbrella’s booklet runs to forty-eight unnumbered pages plus covers. It begins with “Prying Eyes and Unhinged Desires” by Paul Harris, which serves as an introduction to this box set. After a brief overview of the cinematic climate of the time – the decline of drive-ins, the rise of home video, and the advent of 10BA – Harris gives an overview of the three films in this set, in chronological order as above.

“Final Cut and the Much-Maligned Queensland Film Corporation” by Stephen Vagg looks at the history of the QFC. In the late 1960s, the then Prime Minister John Gorton helped to set up the Australian Film Development Corporation to invest in local film production, some of it a success at the box office. State governments began to invest as well. The most commercially and artistically successful was the South Australia Film Corporation, which produced such hits as Sunday Too Far Away and Storm Boy. The other states followed suit, with the QFC set up in 1977. It was intended to last ten years, the theory being that at the end of that time the industry would be able to operate without government support. The QFC’s first production was Final Cut, for which it put up half of the budget. Its second production was a heist film, Touch and Go (1980). In its decade of operation, the QFC never backed a hit but, Vagg argues, many of its film and television productions were of more merit and interest than was thought at the time. The QFC ended in scandal with its chairman Allen Callaghan convicted of misappropriating public funds. It was wound up in 1987, though it was followed by the Queensland Film Development Office which became the present Screen Queensland. Vagg’s article makes a case that the QFC should be better remembered than it is.

Next up is a piece by John Hipwell about Terry Bourke and his work with the director. Inevitably this overlaps with Hipwell’s interview on the Lady, Stay Dead disc, but this lengthy piece is much more detailed. While Hipwell is clear about Bourke’s distinct shortcomings – a reputation for lying, underpaying or not paying cast and crew and for being a tyrant on set – he still calls him a “fascinating and ultimately successful filmmaking character” who had a strong influence on him. Hipwell first met Bourke via the actor Roger Ward, who had worked with Hipwell on Mad Max. Ward introduced Hipwell to Bourke, who was looking for a production manager for Lady, Stay Dead. Hipwell talks about the funding and production of the film, which at times seems to have been an exercise in keeping Bourke under control. They worked together again on Brothers, which is given a much shorter account.

Finally, there is a reprint from David Stratton’s 1990 book about 1980s Australian cinema, The Avocado Plantation, about the troubled production of Crosstalk, with an emphasis on Keith Salvat’s experiences. The booklet also includes reproductions of the press kits for all three films, and an article from The Australian Women’s Weekly on Lady, Stay Dead.

Also in this limited-edition box set are eight poster cards and two double-sided A3 posters, with Final Cut and Crosstalk on one side and Lady, Stay Dead on the other side of both. These can be found inside the cases for Final Cut and Crosstalk.

While you couldn’t make great claims for any of the three films in this set, it does give you the chance to see them in the best quality they have been seen in (including accurate aspect ratios) since their original cinema releases, which one of these didn’t receive. That will be enough for the large number of Ozploitation devotees out there.