Alison’s Birthday (1981)

Alison’s Birthday (1981) lets you know it’s an Australian horror story through the shot of a Cold Chisel album on the floor when a seance goes haywire. At age 16, Alison (Joanne Samuel from Mad Max) is mucking around with a ouija board with a couple of school friends, and receives a warning from the […]

Body Melt (1993)

When the younger cop pulled off his shades to reveal it was Andrew Daddo… a powerful surge ran through me. As a local council mayor said recently during a radio interview, “Think global, act local.” And genres can always travel internationally, globally, such as horror with lots of gore and goop. But that local touch, […]

The Empty Beach (1985)

Bogie in Bondi. The Empty Beach (1985) is a neo-noir shot in Sydney during the mid-1980s, and based on a novel by Peter Corris, one of a series of books devoted to his detective character, Cliff Hardy. A commercial failure at the Australian box office, this is a boilerplate mystery. But what was satisfying to […]

Petrol (2023)

Petrol (2023) is a new Australian film from director Alena Lodkina. I had only caught up recently with her first, Strange Colours, which screened at Revelation Film Festival and is a father-daughter drama set in the Lightning Ridge opal mining bushlands of New South Wales, which I found to be authentic and artful, patiently compelling. […]

Strange Colours (2017)

I watched director Alena Lodkina’s Strange Colours (2017) on SBS On Demand, a few days after I saw Ivan Sen’s Limbo in cinemas. While Limbo works in another recurring genre in Australian film – the crime genre – and there are clear differences in where they are shot, what they are looking at, particularly indigenous […]