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In 2024, I reviewed the first Ozploitation Rarities box set put out by Umbrella Entertainment. That gathered together three deep cuts from the Australian film industry from the 1980s. This is the second box set, and there is a third on the way as I write this. All three films came about due to the increase in film production in Australia that decade prompted by the tax breaks available under the 10BA initiative. That turned out to be a mixed blessing. Films had to be adjudged sufficiently Australian to qualify and had to be exhibited before the end of the financial year they were produced in. However, as so much was in production at the same time, talent on either side of the camera was in short supply and prices increased sharply. Many films were being made essentially as tax write-offs with little regard for quality. Most were made with an eye on cinema screens but realistically stood little chance of that, and went straight to videotape or television instead, and not even that with the first film in this set.
Exams over, three Melbourne schoolgirls, Jilly (Kim Trengrove), Joanne (Kerry Mack) and Liz (Marie O’Loughlin) head off to Portsea for a weekend in a borrowed house near the beach. While they are on the way, they are harassed by men in two black panel vans. Meanwhile, Pamela (Karen West), who has stolen $20,000 from her partner, runs away and finds herself in the house next door, while her partner and the men in the vans are on their way…
Made in 1982, Desolation Angels was the second feature of co-writer/director Christopher Fitchett, following Blood Money in 1980. That was a 62-minuter centring on the relationship between two brothers (played by John Flaus and Bryan Brown), one a criminal trying to go straight. It was made in collaboration with cinematographer Ellery Ryan, who co-wrote with Fitchett (John Ruane was the third credited writer). Fitchett and Ryan also co-wrote Desolation Angels while Fitchett directed and Ryan photographed (in Super 16mm, to be blown up to 35mm for intended cinema release). To avoid any confusion, the title is a tenuous reference to Jack Kerouac’s 1965 novel but the film has nothing to do with the 1995 American film of the same name. Just to confuse matters, the present Desolation Angels has sometimes been known as Fair Game, but is not the Australian film of that title made in 1986 nor indeed the 1995 American film starring Cindy Crawford. You can see a clip from Blood Money in Desolation Angels on a television set.
Clearly an attempt to make a commercial thriller with the help of the newfangled tax breaks, Desolation Angels has some good moments, particularly near the start with the conversations of the girls in their car (plenty of sex talk, with mentions of VOs abounding, and the film leaves it to your imagination as to what that stands for), but runs out of steam before it reaches the end. It’s no doubt ticking a few exploitation boxes to have one of your four female leads be played by the Australian Playboy 1980 Playmate of the Year (West) and have her remove her clothes for the camera. But the film seems uncertain as to whether it wants to be a straightforward thriller or something a little more serious, with a few homoerotic hints to tantalise or titillate as you wish.
The actresses playing the three schoolgirls give decent performances. Kim Trengrove mostly acted on television (up to 2001) and this was her first feature film intended for the big screen. Kerry Mack played the lead role in Hostage the following year but also mostly worked on television, until 1993.This is the only feature credit for Marie O’Loughlin, with otherwise roles in just two television episodes to her name. That’s one more IMDB credit than Karen West has: she was previously in Squizzy Taylor (1982), which also featured Kerry Mack. The film was shot in March and April 1982 and the out-of-season seaside setting is well caught by Ryan’s camera.
Desolation Angels had a showing in June 1982 at the Sydney Opera House to qualify it for 10BA funding. Following screenings in the marketplace at Cannes, its rights were sold to an American company but it did not have a release in Australia on any size screen until this present Blu-ray. It has never been released in the UK either.
A young music student is attacked in her university room and is thrown from the window. She survives, but is murdered in hospital by a masked intruder. Her husband is suspected of the crime, but mature student Kate Martin (Penny Cook) is convinced he is innocent. However, she and her friend Sally (Liddy Clark) come under threat…
This is another case of multiple titles. The packaging and the disc menu call the film Coda: Symphony of Evil, but on screen it’s simply Coda, with the O stylised with the crosshairs of a rifle sight. Symphony of Evil is however a genuine alternative title, used for the UK straight-to-video release for example. Given the setting in a university music department, and several bits of various operas on screen, Coda seems the more fitting title to me, so that’s the one I’ll use.
Coda was made with the television and video market in mind, though with one eye on the big screen just in case it made it there, which it didn’t. The film is a suspense thriller heavily indebted to Hitchcock and with dollops of Brian De Palma and Dario Argento in there too, though violence is toned down to M-rating levels, and queer sexuality is more than hinted at but kept offscreen. Unusually, all the principal roles are women, from Kate and Sally, to the sexually-flexible tutor Dr Leslie Steiner (Arna-Maria Winchester) and the police detective sergeant investigating the murder (Olivia Hamnett). This wasn’t originally intended, as director/co-writer Craig Lahiff envisaged a Bill Hunter type as the policeman but decided to make that role female and Hamnett (probably best known as Richard Chamberlain’s wife in The Last Wave) was cast. Coda was Lahiff’s first feature-length film (following several shorts, two of which are extras on this disc), shot on a low budget of $60,000 in Super 16mm, much of it made on the campus of Flinders University, Adelaide, where he had studied for a science degree while befriending many of the local filmmaking community.
Top-billed Penny Cook had just finished a long run as vet Vicky Bowen (née Dean) on television in A Country Practice. Thirty at the time, she does hold the film together as well as it does, but most of her career was on the small screen. She died in 2018 at the age of sixty-one. Liddy Clarke, four years older and with a career going back to the early 1970s, does well in a standard sparky-sidekick/BFF role.
Coda is a competently-made thriller, if inevitably derivative. It tends to fall into a series of setpieces and is a good twenty minutes too long. It went straight to video in Australia and did the same in the UK under the Symphony of Evil title.
At the age of eight, Heather Thompson watched her father (Tony Blackett) murder a man on what would be the thirteenth floor of a building he is constructing. The man’s young son stumbles on to the scene and is also killed by electrocution. Twelve years later, Heather (Lisa Hensley) is estranged from her father. With her friend Rebecca (Miranda Otto) she squats in the deserted thirteenth floor of the office building (which we know is in Sydney due to frequent shots of the Harbour Bridge). No company has stayed long there and rumour has it the floor is cursed. With her father’s thugs after her, strange things begin to happen…
Made in 1988, The 13th Floor was one of a package of four films put together by executive producer Tom Broadbridge. They were shot around the same time, on smallish budgets of $600,000 or thereabouts, intended for the video market but shot on 35mm with an eye to a possible cinema release, all straight-down-the-line thrillers and horror films or, as in this case, both. Many of them were made by newer filmmakers. To Make a Killing (aka Vicious) was the second feature of Karl Zwicky, written by him and P.J. Hogan (billed as Paul J. Hogan) long before the latter made a big impression with his own second feature as director Muriel’s Wedding. Kadaicha (aka Stones of Blood) was folk horror directed by debutant James Bogle. On the other hand, Out of the Body was the work of a veteran, Brian Trenchard-Smith. And there was The 13th Floor, written and directed by Chris Roache, his only credit in the latter capacity. The film was something of a troubled production, with four days of reshoots from another director (Adrian Carr) and cinematographer (future Oscar-winner the late Andrew Lesnie). Like the other films in the package, its targeting video rather than television enables stronger content – more graphic violence, some (but not much) sexuality and drug use, and one use of strong language – than would have been allowed on broadcast at the time, and this is reflected in the fact that the film has a R rating (as does To Make a Killing) when the others in this box set are rated M.
There are plenty of holes in the plot – how does someone like Heather, who is living illegally and surviving on biscuits pilfered from a canteen trolley have so many changes of clothes? Even if this does enable a love scene between her and John Burke (Tim McKenzie) with non-manky underwear. Hensley, in her second film (she was in The Good Wife aka The Umbrella Woman from the year before), aged nineteen, manages well and was at the start of a career which continues to this day, but scenes are stolen by Miranda Otto (in her third film) who makes the most of a standard sidekick role, rather sidelined until the time comes for her to be written out. As with Desolation Angels, there is a hint of a possibly one-sided lesbian attraction between the two young women. Another familiar face appears in the later scenes: Michael Caton, nine years before The Castle, with his trademark moustache but slimmer here than there, as a doctor who adds a sinister turn to the plot. Incidentally, one of the script supervisors was Chris Fitchett.
Given that the finished film is a patchwork of the work of two directors and two cinematographers (Stephen Prime on the main shoot), The 13th Floor is a competent thriller with supernatural horror overtones which don’t really kick in until the final act. It’s not unwatchable and I’m sure would have passed muster for most on a rainy night on a tape rented from the local video shop.
Ozploitation Rarities Volume Two is a limited-edition (1000 numbered copies) three-disc box set released by Umbrella. The discs are encoded for all regions. The set has an R rating (seventeen and over) due to The 13th Floor, with the other two films rated M – advisory, but may not be suitable for under-fifteens. (In the UK, Desolation Angels has never been submitted to the BBFC, but the other two were both passed for VHS release. You can see a video sleeve for Coda, under the title Symphony of Evil, in the Liddy Clarke interview on that film’s disc, with an 18 certificate but it was actually passed uncut under that title at 15. The 13th Floor was passed 18, but the BBFC made two cuts, The first was to the close-up throat-cutting immediately before the opening title card. The other was to caretaker Bert posing with a pair of nunchaku (chainsticks) in the mirror of the office-block toilets as he searches for Heather*. Both of these shots would not be cut now, especially not the latter which was a case of the BBFC at the time not allowing sight of martial arts weaponry, even in films passed for adults. They did allow a few earlier shots of Bert with closed nunchaku on his shoulder.)
Desolation Angels was shot in Super 16mm, blown up to 35mm for its very few cinema screenings. According to the film’s cinematographer Ellery Ryan, the Blu-ray transfer is 2K from a 16mm print, the original negative being AWOL. He acknowledges that the results are more contrasty than they would otherwise be, as is the way with transfers from cinema prints, so this is the case of best available in the circumstances. As with most 16mm-shot films, it’s softer and grainier than you would get with something originated on 35mm, but that’s to be expected. The aspect ratio of the transfer is 1.78:1, opened up slightly from the very likely 1.85:1 it would have been shown at in a cinema from a 35mm print.
Coda was also shot in Super 16mm, also blown up to 35mm for cinema showings, and here the 2K transfer is approved by cinematographer David Foreman. In his interview on the disc, he says that the film was shot in 1.33:1, given that its intended market was television and video, and that’s the ratio of the transfer here. However, he says that the compositions were protected for the wider ratio of 1.85:1 in case it had cinema showings or a release. As with Desolation Angels, it’s soft and certainly grainy, with the colours less vibrant than they might have been.
The 13th Floor was shot in 35mm and the transfer is in 1.78:1, likewise opened up slightly from the intended 1.85:1 for cinema showings. Given the higher-definition source than the other two films, there’s a noticeable uptick with colours, sharpness and grain, though like a lot of films made around this time, it’s noticeably overlit in many of the darker scenes, clearly shot that way knowing that most people would watch the result on TV from a VHS tape and any carefully-calibrated chiaroscuro would devolve into murk. But that’s a feature of the source material, not an issue with this transfer.
All three films were released with mono soundtracks, rendered on these discs as Dolby Digital 2.0. No doubt some will comment on these Blu-ray discs featuring lossy rather than lossless tracks, and it’s certainly true that none of these will show off your sound system to any great extent, and there are some rough patches in the 13th Floor track. All three have English subtitles available for the hard of hearing. This is an area where Umbrella discs often fall down on, compared to releases from other labels. The tracks for the first two films spend a lot of time describing the music score (“slow tense music” and the like) and rendering sound effects that we can guess are there (if a gun is fired on screen, we should know if we don’t hear it, but can safely assume we do). There are also instances where part of the dialogue is rendered as “indistinct” or “inaudible” where I could make out what people were saying. The track on The 13th Floor doesn’t do these things, but there are a fair number of typos in it, including some misspellings of character names.
DESOLATION ANGELS:
Commentary by Chris Fitchett and Ellery Ryan
Co-writer/director Fitchett and co-writer/cinematographer Ryan convene in 2024 to discuss this film from early in their careers. Fitchett was teaching at Ormond College, Melbourne, making films on the side. He pressed the College into service for the school scenes at the start, with many of the schoolgirls dressed in private-school uniforms appearing as extras. This commentary is more scene-specific than not, but there is some discussion of the film’s background and production. They have a minor difference of opinion at the start, with Ryan saying the opening voiceover is influenced by Rebecca and Fitchett saying I Walked with a Zombie. Ryan contributes a good few technical details, including pointing out some Steadicam shots. This was an early Australian use of the equipment, which proved more cost-effective than hiring tracks and dollies, a consideration with a budget small enough to require shooting in Super 16mm. Karen West’s topless scene (shot with just the two men present) is beautiful or tacky and gratuitous depending on who you agree with. There’s also a suggestion that one scene featuring Nick Lathouris prefigures Death in Brunswick (1990) in which Lathouris also featured.
The Car as Villain in Australian Cinema (9:55)
Stephen Vagg engagingly begins this video essay on the Desolation Angels disc by saying it’s “an excuse to discuss the film and watch a lot of cool clips”. There’s not a lot of the former but plenty of the latter. He begins outside Australia with some American predecessor car movies, especially Duel (which he sees as an influence on the feature in hand) and the cycle which included Smokey and the Bandit, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry and The Gumball Rally. In those three films, the car is the ally of the human hero, but a car can be an antagonist, as it is in Duel (with its unseen driver) and also the evil vehicles in The Car and Christine. Over in Australia, cars can certainly be a threat, as they are in Long Weekend (spoiler alert), Snapshot (the villain in a Mr Whippy ice cream van), Roadgames. Vagg suggests there may a class basis to this, with car culture being associated with the working classes, with races in The FJ Holden (1977)** and a place where boys can get their end away whether the girls like it or not, in Puberty Blues (1981 – don’t watch this clip at work). Then there are the vehicles in the kangaroo hunt in Wake in Fright (1971). There’s a brief mention of other modes of transport available, such as the horses in The Man from Snowy River (1982) and Phar Lap (1983), However, there are films sympathetic to working-class car culture, such as Midnite Spares (1983), Malcolm (1986) and The Big Steal (1990).
Aussie Car Movie Trailer Reel (31:20)
In the absence of any trailer for Desolation Angels itself, we have half an hour of trailers for car movies. As with the equivalents on other discs, these come from a variety of sources, such as VHS, standard-definition from DVDs, even HD for those films available on Blu-ray. Some of the trailers show damage, but none are in so bad a condition as to be unwatchable. With Volume One, I did mention that this item had no chapter stops, so you couldn’t go to a particular trailer without fast-forwarding or fast-reversing, but here we do indeed have chapter stops. The trailers are in chronological order: The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), Sidecar Racers (1975), The FJ Holden, Mad Max (1979), The Chain Reaction (1980), Roadgames (1981), Mad Max 2 (1981, this being a US trailer under the title The Road Warrior), Freedom (1982), Running on Empty (1982), Midnite Spares, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), Fair Game (1986), Malcolm, Dead-End Drive-In (1986), The Big Steal (this trailer with a stereo soundtrack), Metal Skin (1994).
1983 AFI Trailer (3:21)
Not so much a trailer as a brief showreel of clips from some of the films eligible for the 1983 Australian Film Institute Awards (now known as the AACTA Awards), which include the main feature on this disc. So we have: Phar Lap, The Clinic, Desolation Angels, Stanley, Now and Forever, The City’s Edge, The Settlement, Man of Flowers, The Wild Duck and Hostage. Some of these are available on Blu-ray, others on DVD or streaming, some not available at all and four decades later pretty much forgotten.
CODA
Commentary with Anni Browning, Gus Howard and Liddy Clark
Rounded up for this commentary are production designer Browning, first assistant director Howard and co-lead Clark. Craig Lahiff is unavoidably absent (he died in 2014 at the age of sixty-six) so inevitably he is subject of quite a few stories from the three. Howard says that he basically made the film as a series of setpieces with influences clearly in mind – Hitchcock mainly, but Hitchcock via Brian De Palma is also in there. The commentary is largely scene-specific but there’s quite a rapport between the participants, which is always a help. Howard tells an interesting story about the “Georgia O’Keeffe” house where Steiner lives. It was a genuine house, which had been completed shortly before the film production so was empty. Howard knows the owners who had the house built to their specifications: filmmmaker and lecturer David Woodgate and artist Erika Calder. The latter has another filmmaking connection: her mother was Helen Grieve, who was in The Overlanders (1946) and Bush Christmas (1947) as a teen. Coda was a product of the 10BA era and, as per Howard, in many cases the crew – often more experienced due to the increased amount of work brought about by the tax breaks – made the film rather than the director. Money could sometimes be an issue: Clark remembers a film (Stir, released 1980) where it ran out so production shut down for a week.
Interview with David Foreman (29:28)
David Foreman became involved with Coda due to knowing producer/co-writer Terry Jennings. He had however worked with Craig Lahiff as a camera operator previously. (He doesn’t specify the film, but it was the 52-minute The Coming, made in 1981). He states that Coda was a first feature film for many of the crew and the budget was too tight to hire a Steadicam, so mobile shots in corridors (many of them shot at Flinders University in Adelaide) were achieved with the camera operator in a wheelchair, occasionally with a dolly. Hitchcock was certainly an influence, and so was John Carpenter with that moving camera. Foreman continued to work with Lahiff until the latter’s final film Swerve (2011).
Interview with Liddy Clark (12:00)
Clark begins by being proud of the fact that South Australia was one of the most active filmmaking states in Australia at the time. As she does so, thumbnails of posters of relevant films appear on the right-hand side of the screen, including such big titles as Storm Boy and Picnic at Hanging Rock (which many people don’t realise was mostly made in SA despite being set in Victoria). But, as she adds, quoting a filmmaking friend of hers, “some shit got made”. She notes the fact that in this film all the principal characters are women and how much a novelty that was. (We see some of the Variety review of the film and this picks up on it too.) Clark was clearly very fond of Craig Lahiff. She is quite exercised by her costume in the film which she says is very much of its time, and she notes that someone of her short stature (she says 1.52m which is a shade over 4’11” for the imperial-inclined) she wasn’t given heels to wear and instead spent the whole film in flats.
The VHS Experience (99:35)
As with Volume One, Umbrella have let us go retro and relive the 1980s by watching the film on recreated VHS as the majority of the audience would have seen it that way. (As Desolation Angels didn’t have an Australian VHS release, you’ll have to forego the experience in that case.) VHS resolution was of course below standard definition, in fact lower than it would have been if you had watched the film on television. I’ll repeat the nitpick that if you had watched Coda on an Australian VHS tape (or indeed in the UK under the Symphony of Evil title) the film would have run at twenty-five frames per second and shed four minutes in running time due to PAL speed-up, but the transfer on this Blu-ray disc runs at 24fps.
Labyrinth (18:40)
It’sThe Labyrinth on the menu and packaging, but the onscreen title does not have a definite article. Labyrinth was produced, edited and directed by Craig Lahiff while at Flinders University. Made in 1979, this short was shot in 16mm and is based on stories by Jorge Luis Borges, adapted by John (now Josephine) Emery, who had written the story on which Phillip Noyce’s first feature Backroads (1977) was based and continued to work with Lahiff on future films. This film has no writing credits, however. Two Nazi spies in wartime England are working in isolation until they find that a disgraced Irish captain has been sent to kill them. A rather low-key short, which is a somewhat odd fit for an avowed maker of commercial fare. Labyrinth is presented in 4:3 from what looks like a video source and with a noticeable crackle on the soundtrack.
The Jogger (9:45)
An office worker (John Saunders) goes into the Gents’ and takes off his shirt and suit to reveal that he is...Super Jogger. And so off he goes, along a main street in Adelaide, through a cemetery while a funeral is taking place, along a racetrack. He takes time out for a brief wipe of his sweaty forehead by a petrol pump, picks up a KFC for his wife and child and then heads off for the seaside where he is distracted by a young woman jogger in a tight pair of shorts. An amusing skit, with no dialogue until the fourth-wall break at the end. Made in 1980, again at Flinders University, this went on to have a cinema release as a supporting short. Again there is no writing credit. This is also presented in 4:3. Labyrinth and The Jogger were previously released by Umbrella on the Blu-ray of Lahiff’s 1997 feature Heaven’s Burning.
Craig Lahiff Trailer Reel (11:19)
As with other trailer reels on this disc, these coming attractions are from a variety of sources, VHS, SD from DVDs, HD from Blu-rays. Again there are chapter stops, so you can skip to any particular one you want to see. Presented in chronological order, they are: Coda, Fever (1989), Ebbtide (1994 – a “shocking and erotic story” so this one is probably not safe for work), Heaven’s Burning, Black and White (2002) and Lahiff’s final film Swerve (2011). So, this includes every feature Lahiff made except Strangers (1991).
Original trailer (2:09)
A serviceable trailer, but frankly redundant as a disc extra as it is also included in the Lahiff trailer reel, at the start of it too.
THE 13TH FLOOR
Commentary by Chris Roache
“I’ve got a few stories about the history of this little production,” says writer/director Roache at the start of this commentary. And he does in this mainly scene-specific chat, though I suspect he may be constrained by whether some people are alive or not. One who isn’t is producer David Hannay (who died in 2014) and so we hear about the conflicts Roache had with him. Hannay wanted to involve himself in the casting, particularly of women, which seemed to boil down to whether he fancied them or not. And he clearly didn’t fancy Lisa Hensley, and tried to have her taken off the film. One particular elephant in the room is addressed: Roache refused to do the reshoots as Hannay would not let him use the film’s DP and camera operator Stephen Prime. (Two days of night reshoots had to be redone as the film was scratched at the lab.) Roache also doesn’t address the fact that this was his only feature film as director, though he mentions previous film-school work, some of it involving Prime and some actors who have roles in this film, and a later script by Prime and himself which did the rounds but was never made. There’s a persistent crackle on the soundtrack of this commentary.
Interview with Lisa Hensley (9:31)
This is a newly-recorded audio interview by Andrew Mercado. Hensley found watching herself over thirty-five years ago at the age of nineteen something of a confronting experience. She had been one of the few people to have seen the film in a 35mm showing, at the cast and crew screening, but inevitably the atmosphere was different. Nowadays, the low budget and the quality of the special effects are more noticeable. Her children don’t normally watch her films, but her son (also an actor) did get to see her climactic scene here. Hensley does detail which parts of the film were reshot, such as some close-ups in the love scene and all the exteriors of people running.
Women in Peril (15:44)
With a spoiler warning, here is Andrew Mercado again with an overview of the three films in this set, all of which feature...you guessed it, women in peril. John in The 13th Floor apart, none of the men in the films come out of it very well. Mercado identifies a couple of Australian predecessors: Journey Among Women (1977, with a full-frontal shot I suggest you don’t watch at work) and the 1980 heist film Touch and Go. As for the films in this set themselves, Mercado adopts a mickey-taking tone, pointing out plot holes and the strange Sydney geography of The 13th Floor. Incidentally, the clips from Coda are shown in widescreen here and not 4:3.
The VHS Experience (89:59)
As with Coda, you can go party like it’s 1988 and watch it on a VHS transfer (though without the need for a VCR), in 4:3 with some noticeable tracking errors in sub-standard definition. The pedantic quibble above about the running speed and therefore duration of Coda applies here too.
Alternate Ending (4:48)
As the menu puts it, “A (Slightly) Alternate Ending”, transferred from a timecoded video source, which takes us from a nighttime exterior of the office building to the point where the end credits start. You’d be hard put to spot the changes between this and what is on the main feature, and the difference it makes is non-existent. I had to play both versions side by side to spot the differences. A minute in, the line “Dr Fletcher says you didn’t stay to finish your treatment” loses the two italicised words in the main feature. A shot of Heather pointing at the document vital to the plot is cut into a shot of her father, and the special-effects frenzy that ensues is edited differently in the two versions. And that’s about it.
Original trailer (2:20)
For 13th Floor, as this trailer has it, omitting the definite article. This uses the suspense-movie trailer tactic of counting down, or in this case up, to the number in the film’s title.
Booklet
Umbrella’s booklet in this limited edition (of 1000) set runs to forty-eight pages and begins with brief introductions to the three films by Paul Harris. Then it’s on to “The Making of Desolation Angels in 1982”, with accounts by Chris Fitchett and Ellery Ryan, with a brief epilogue about the film’s afterlife, including its distribution or lack of it. A page of Karen West’s Playmate Data Sheet is followed by a magazine article you might not want to read at work as it contains several nude and topless shots of Ms West and features such insights as the fact that she’d like to try skiing down a slope completely nude. The section on Coda begins with “The Life and Times of Director Craig Lahiff”, in which Paul Harris covers Lahiff’s films and suggests he was a somewhat neglected figure, and if “it is possible to major contribution to the culture and the box office if your aim is to create popular entertainments”, which I’d suggest is a question that doesn’t need asking. “Movie Man Eschews Art” is the title of a piece from the Canberra Times in which Jeff Waters interviews Tom Broadbridge about his package of four films, of which The 13th Floor was one. (This refers to To Make a Killing as Vicious, though says it’s a working title, and spells Kadaicha as Kadaycha.) David Hannay is interviewed for Video – The Magazine in 1988 by Guy Saebar “about what it takes to be big Down Under”. The 13th Floor is to be the first of many features by Chris Roach [sic], it’s predicted, but that didn’t come to pass. Finally, there is a seven-page scrapbook for The 13th Floor, including concept sketches, a poster design, the UK video sleeve and press cuttings.
Also included in this box set are a set of poster cards for the three films, which include one for Desolation Angels under its Fair Game title, and a still of one character’s gory demise in The 13th Floor. There are also two reversible A3 posters inside the cases for Coda and The 13th Floor, though they’re for random other horror films than the ones in this box: Dollman/Dollman vs Demonic Toys and Demonic Toys/Demonic Toys 2 respectively. Also with this limited edition is a ziploc bag with two more appropriate reversible A3 posters: Desolation Angels (as Fair Game)/The 13th Floor and Coda backed with a poster featuring all three films in the set.
This is the second of Umbrella’s box sets of Ozploitation Rarities. (Volume three, comprising Scobie Malone (1975), Goodbye Paradise (1982) and The Empty Beach (1985), is due to be released on 9 July.) While I have quibbles, you can’t for the most part complain about the presentation of these three films, though the set is, like the first, one more for the connoisseur as the films are middling at best. I’ll repeat my complaint that if you can pass a film off as Ozploitation, it can have the luxury of a restoration and a Blu-ray release when some major films of the 1970s and 1980s languish on SD streams and out-of-print DVDs if they are not altogether AWOL.
** The leading actor of this film, Paul Couzens, is no relation to me as far as I’m aware. This was his only screen role.
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