‘BMX Bandits’ and beyond: Quentin Tarantino’s favourite Australian movies
Nobody could ever accuse Quentin Tarantino of not wearing his heart on his sleeve. The ultra-violent director has made a career out of paying tribute to the movies he enjoyed as a young man. Jackie Brown is a throwback to the blaxploitation genre that grew in popularity in the 1970s, whilst the Kill Bill duology is a clear nod to exaggerated martial arts movies, particularly those in the samurai subgenre.
You might not know that Tarantino is a huge patron of Australian cinema. He has written and spoken extensively on the subject. In 2008, he contributed to the documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!, a term used to describe low-budget, taboo-tackling films produced in the land Down Under. Whilst director Mark Hartley coined that particular phrase, it was actually Tarantino who first came up with the term ‘Aussiesploitation’, which was eventually shortened to become the more accepted name. Although, if you ask the man himself, he’ll tell you it was all his idea.
“I’m not going to charge you a royalty but there should be a little R next to that expression, with a little circle around it,” he teased The Guardian during an interview. “Australian genre films were a lot of fun because they were legitimate genre movies. They were real genre films and they dealt, in a way like the Italians did, with the excess of genre, and that has been an influence on me.” He then invited the interviewer to look around his personal collection of Aussie movies, which threw up some interesting names.
The most high-profile film named by the newspaper is Roadgames, a 1981 thriller directed by Psycho II filmmaker and Tarantino favourite Richard Franklin. Starring Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis, the film pits a truck driver against a serial killer in a battle of wits on a desolation Outback road. Despite containing a big star like Curtis, the film failed to make a splash in the Aussie market or on home video overseas. It has earned a cult status, inspiring Tarantino and the 2005 horror film Wolf Creek, a successful Australian export.
Another reel in Tarantino’s compendium is Brian Trenchard-Smith’s BMX Bandits, a crime-comedy notable for featuring one of the earliest appearances from a bonafide Aussie legend. It follows three teenagers obsessed with BMX bikes, PJ, Goose, and Judy, played by a young Nicole Kidman. The kids end up in the crosshairs of a bank-robbing gang after they steal a pair of walkie-talkies integral to their next heist.
The rest of Quentin’s delights from the Southern Hemisphere are two more radically different films. There’s The Picture Show Man, a movie about early silent films starring Rod Taylor (whose final film was Inglourious Basterds); Dark Age, a horror featuring an overgrown crocodile; and High Rolling in a Hot Corvette, a road trip comedy with a middling plot, but an excellent name. He also had with him an episode of the TV show Riptide, an Australian-produced adventure show with an American lead.
Australian cinema still isn’t a massive needle mover, but it’s clearly had a profound effect on one of the world’s most popular directors. Tarantino really knows his stuff when it comes to Ozploitation, so maybe these obscure rarities are worth a go.
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