Category: Film and TV

I rather enjoyed this B-movie. The film is considered an Ozplotation classic.

About the movie

A young woman running a wildlife sanctuary in the Australian outback is in for trouble when three kangaroo hunters confront her. Bored with killing kangaroos, they decide to kill the animals in the sanctuary, and when they see how attractive the owner is, they decide to have a little “fun” with her, too. They may get a bit more “fun” than they bargained for.

About Ozplotation

Ozploitation films are exploitation films – a category of low-budget horror, comedy, sexploitation, and action films – made in Australia after introducing the R rating in 1971. The year also marked the beginnings of the Australian New Wave movement, and the Ozploitation style peaked within the same time frame (early 1970s to late 1980s).

Ozploitation is often considered a minor wave within the New Wave, covering a wide range of genres from sexploitation, biker films, horror and even martial arts.

The origin of the term “Ozploitation” is credited to the documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation. This 2008 feature explores Ozploitation films made during the Australian New Wave. The film includes interviews with numerous figures involved in Ozploitation, as well as fans of the genre, including American director Quentin Tarantino, who coined the phrase “Aussiesploitation”, which director Mark Hartley then shortened to “Ozploitation”.

Australian horror film production trebled from fewer than 20 films in the 1990s to over 60 films between 2000 and 2008. According to one researcher, “global forces and emerging production and distribution models are challenging the ‘narrowness’ of cultural policy – a narrowness that mandates a particular film culture, circumscribes certain notions of value and limits the variety of films produced domestically. Despite their low-culture status, horror films have been well suited to the Australian film industry’s financial limitations, they are a growth strategy for producers, and a training ground for emerging filmmakers”.

The film explores Hilma af Klint’s enigmatic life, now recognized as one of the Western world’s first abstract artists. It is a well-played portrait of a woman today regarded as an icon in the art world.

About Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint (26 October 1862 – 21 October 1944) was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings are considered among the first abstract works known in Western art history. A considerable body of her work predates the first purely abstract compositions by Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian. She belonged to a group called “The Five,” comprising a circle of women inspired by Theosophy, who believed in the importance of trying to contact the so-called “High Masters”—often by way of séances. Her paintings, which sometimes resemble diagrams, visually represented complex spiritual ideas.

In 1880, her younger sister Hermina died, and at this time, the spiritual dimension of her life began to develop. Her interest in abstraction and symbolism came from Hilma af Klint’s involvement in spiritism, very much in vogue at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Her experiments in spiritual investigation started in 1879. She became interested in the Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and the philosophy of Christian Rosencreutz. In 1908, she met Rudolf Steiner, the founder of the Anthroposophical Society, who was visiting Stockholm. Steiner introduced her to his own theories regarding the arts, and would have some influence on her paintings later in life. Several years later, in 1920, she met him again at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, the headquarters of the Anthroposophical Society. Between 1921 and 1930 she spent long periods at the Goetheanum.

Af Klint’s work can be understood in the broader context of the modernist search for new forms in artistic, spiritual, political, and scientific systems at the beginning of the twentieth century. There was a similar interest in spirituality by other artists during this same period, including Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich, Fidus, and the French Nabis, in which many, like af Klint, were inspired by the Theosophical Movement.

The works of Hilma af Klint are mainly spiritual, and her artistic work is a consequence of this. She felt the abstract work and the meaning within were so groundbreaking that the world was not ready to see it, and she wished for the work to remain unseen for 20 years after her death.

An entertaining (if you can label a supernatural horror film that) directed by Julius Avery from a screenplay by Michael Petroni and Evan Spiliotopoulos, based on the 1990 book An Exorcist Tells His Story and the 1992 book An Exorcist: More Stories by Father Gabriele Amorth.

About Father Amorth

Gabriele Amorth S.S.P. (Italian: [ɡabriˈɛːle ˈaːmort]; May 1, 1925 – September 16, 2016) was an Italian Catholic priest of the Paulines and an exorcist for the Diocese of Rome. Amorth and five other priests founded the International Association of Exorcists.

His work in demonology and exorcism gained him international recognition. Father Amorth claimed to have performed tens of thousands of exorcisms, at least 60,000 throughout his career. He became one of the most prominent and controversial figures in the Catholic Church in the modern era.

Amorth was born in Modena, Emilia-Romagna, Italy, on May 1, 1925. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1954 and was appointed an exorcist of the Diocese of Rome in June 1986 under the tutelage of Candido Amantini. He was a member of the Society of St. Paul, the congregation founded by Giacomo Alberione in 1914. In 1990, he founded the International Association of Exorcists and was president until his retirement in 2000.

Both Father Amorth’s father and grandfather were lawyers. His contributions during World War II as a courageous fighter for the Italian resistance movement were followed by his pursuit of legal studies. Additionally, Father Amorth served as a deputy to Giulio Andreotti, a prominent figure in Italian politics who would later become Prime Minister within the influential political organization of the Young Christian Democrats.

Amorth died at the age of 91 on September 16, 2016, a short time after he was hospitalized for pulmonary complications.

Madde lives a hectic life in Stockholm. One day she receives a letter from her father Leif who wants her to come back to her childhood home. An intense weekend with her father changes her attitude to the rural area she left a long time ago.

A rather predictable movie portraying a broken father-daugther relationship.