Studying a thing and being able to do that thing aren’t the same. As much as the phrase “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” genuinely annoys me for how condescending it is, and admittedly some of that may be insecurity about my own lot in life commenting on the work of others for fun and profit, there is some degree of truth to it. And that seems to be the case for Aussie director Mark Hartley here. The man has put a lot of effort into documenting the history of exploitation cinema, both here and abroad, to the point where his film Not Quite Hollywood is what originally coined the term ‘Ozploitation’. Between that and his documentary on the history of Cannon Films, Electric Boogaloo, the man seems to know his stuff. But looking at his own attempt to add to the tradition of Ozploitation cinema, he doesn’t seem able to apply much of it.
The story plays out like your standard suspicious-neighbor thriller, like The Woman In The Window or any number of Rear Window-influenced features like the recently-reviewed Kimi. We have teenager Amy (Ella Newton) starting to suspect that her new next-door neighbor Chris (Vince Colosimo) is a serial killer known as the Clockwork Killer. Out of some combination of obsession born out of survivor’s guilt over the death of her own father, and possibly some prophetic dreams about Clockwork’s past victims, she becomes Walter Sobchak levels of convinced that Chris is guilty. Along with leading to some particularly tired reiterations of the old gaslighting trick where she keeps trying to tell everyone this, but no-one believes her, it is all laid on so bloody thick that not only is it devoid of any atmosphere or tension, but it might as well be flashing a massive neon sign that reads “PLOT TWIST AHEAD”.
It’s like an attempt to reverse-engineer Bart Of Darkness back into the original Rear Window, and have it be taken just as seriously as the latter. Quite the attempt when it can barely make its own presentation worth taking seriously. Garry Richards’ cinematography has its moments of slickness, but between the utterly leaden dialogue from Terence Hammond and Nicolette Minster, and Jamie Blanks’ impossibly melodramatic soundtrack, it makes for a production that knows how it trashy it is, yet still seems uncomfortable with that knowledge.
And speaking of being uncomfortable, the way that Amy’s character is treated here feels all kinds of wrong. With how heavy the script goes in pointing out her trauma, her nigh-on deranged mindset about proving who the Clockwork Killer is, and her scenes at school and with her best friend Lian (Karis Oka) being so utterly different from every other scene with her in it, she doesn’t make for the most engaging lead performance. Not only that, but as the film continues to lay into her, it stops feeling dramatic and starts feeling excessively mean-spirited, like the filmmakers are intending for us to be entertained by someone being dragged further into their own neuroses like this. That the film seems intent on giving her a ‘Makes It Easy’ conclusion, as if that magically makes everything else okay, just makes that sit even less easy.
There is a point where a film’s evident intent of being a quick-and-dirty thriller has to reckon with how it’s so eager to unleash the thrills that it feels less like drive-in cinema and more like drive-by cinema. When it isn’t being unpleasant for reasons beyond its eye-gouging violence, or baffling and verging-on-hilarious for its plot developments, it’s just plain boring because it’s so repetitive. I watched this film on rental at home, but I can still tell that, had I seen this in cinemas when it came out earlier in the year, I would’ve been both completely alone in that theatre, and pacing up and down the aisles to get through the frustration.
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