Thriller Movies made in Australia, or in other locations with Australian actors, directors and producers (amazing how the actors can copy very well an American accent)…seem to have a different viewpoint than an American thriller does.
I can’t remember specific examples. But it seems like whenever I have watched a thriller type movie with an unexpectedly “bad” ending…“bad” in the sense that the bad guy or guys always wins. The “good” people are always toast, and in the most horrible ways…it always seems to be an Australian produced movie.
Are the Australians into some sort of “film noir” genre of their own?
I do find these type of movies to be fascinating, even though I am always depressed at the end.
You should check out Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (if you haven’t already). It’s a documentary about the history of Australia’s low-budget film industry.
The bad guys usually win in American horror movies, too. Or at least, they’re almost NEVER really dead at the end.
Michael Myers is still alive at the end of almost every Halloween movie. (And even when he isn’t, he’ll be alive in a sequel.)
Freddie Krueger always seems to win.
Jason Voorhees never dies for long.
Hannibal Lecter is invincible.
Jigsaw and his disciples always win in the Saw movies.
The killer mutants are still alive and killing people at the end of the ***Hills Have ***Eyes and ***Wrong Turn ***movies.
Every low-budget horror movie you run into on the SyFy network ends with the killer surviving (even when he SEEMS to be dead, he’ll either start twitching right or spring to life and kill the last surviving hero/heroine right before the credits.
You can get tied up in knots over cultural stereotypes but Australian don’t do the indestructable superhero, the “good guy gets ticked off, kills all the daddies and gets the girl” thriller though we’ll happily watch yours.
Maybe it’s a consequence of an egalarian ethos, maybe we just don’t have an film industry that can produce franchises of the “Mulga Bill and the Cycle of Doom IV” genre. Maybe it is a function of the size of the special effects budgets. Maybe because the average Aussie bloke doesn’t have enough weaponry in his back shed to sustain a small civil war.
Personally I’m more of the view that “We’ll give him a fair go” will trump every time “he looks at my girl friend funny so I’m going to blast him and all his family”.
Contrast The Odd Angry Shot with virtually any American Vietnam War thriller.
ombre12, you make it sound like Australian films are untypical of the movies made around the world because they are more likely to have unhappy endings than those of most countries. On the contrary, I think that American films are untypical of the movies made around the world because they are more likely to have happy endings than those of most countries.
Only Australia could have a national song about a sheep thief who kills himself when the police catch up with him, or a national hero who robbed banks, shot police, and was executed in the end. (Waltzing Matilda and Ned Kelly, respectively).
One of my all-time favorite movies is Breaker Morant, a historical court-martial drama and an Australian classic, and although there are certainly some moral shades of gray, two of the three “good guys” are executed at the end.
The difference between Australian and US narratives isn’t in the “criminal outlaw”/“lone dude against the Big Guys” style of stories. We both have those. They’re frontier narratives, and both of our countries have/have had frontiers.
The difference is, you guys in the US have a narrative that we lack, which is the “Good powerful guys save the world” narrative. The Australian psyche has this weird combination of “Best bloody country in the world, mate” combined with a sense of being small, totally unimportant to pretty much everyone else, and exty million miles away from where the really important shit is happening.
To move away from thrillers, which I don’t know heaps about … “Superman”, for instance, could never ever have been made in Australia. Nor could Star Trek, or Star Gate, or B5 … any of these stories where important decisions involving the fate of the world are being made by the protagonists. We do things more like, say “The Dish”, with its prevailing sense of “hey, here’s history being made out there and…holy crap WE’RE involved in this somehow!!! How the fuck did THAT happen?”. Or Farscape. The Terminator films couldn’t really be made in Australia either, because they’re all about “what we do here is crucially important to the future, even if it doesn’t look like it.” Just doesn’t work for us. But Mad Max could, because he’s just trying to survive himself, and that’s basically what we look for.
That’s a pretty gross overstatement: Pecos Bill, John Henry, Paul Bunyan, Babe the Blue Ox, Alfred Bulltop Stormalong, Mike Fink, Johnny Appleseed, Davy Crockett, Casey Jones, etc. weren’t criminal outlaws.
Yes, I know the last three were real people who later became legendary.
IMO it has always been a bit of an ideal more than day to day practice, but the idea of our strong egalitarian ideals stemmed from rejecting the British class system.
We’d like to think that Australia has always been about giving some ‘a fair go’ regardless of where they’re from, who there parents were, etc. It’s a time-worn meme in Australia that you can never tell how rich and powerful someone is by their dress or how they talk. And to some extent that is true, Have a look at Clive Palmer for example, if you saw him on the street (which I actually did the other day, in a public phone box of all places), you’d never think he was one of the richest men in the country.