Australia After Dark (1976)

Australia After Dark is a 1976 ozploitation/sexploitation feature which belongs to the weird and wonderful mondo film genre.

The mondo film, which began in Italy in 1962 with Mondo Cane, was very much an artifact of the 1960s. A mondo film is a pseudo-documentary focusing on brief looks at weird and sensational things, with some genuine footage and some faked footage. It’s a genre that hasn’t aged well. The mondo sex film is a curious sub-genre of a curious genre and Australia After Dark is such a film.

Being a mondo film means that there’s no plot at all. And since each segment only runs a couple of minutes there’s absolutely zero narrative anywhere. The connections between the segments are tenuous at best but mostly non-existent. There are no thematic connections. But that’s how mondo films are. Insofar as they have an appeal it lies in the fact that you have absolutely no idea what to expect next.

It was the nudity that was going to sell the movie (and in fact did sell it) and there’s an immense amount of frontal nudity. On the other hand a mondo film is supposed to cover a huge range of sensational or weird subjects so the sexy segments are interspersed with odd sensational stuff.

Director John D. Lamond always had an eye on international markets so there’s lots of Australiana (especially stuff dealing with the Outback) which would have bored Australian viewers to tears but would have seemed exotic to overseas audiences.

And you know that the boring segments will be over in a minute or two and we’ll be back to nude women. Lamond really did understand what sells.

The challenge of course is to find dozens of different ways to get attractive young women out of their clothes. Lamond is up to the challenge. Girls trying on bikinis. Nude bathing on the Barrier Reef. Clothing fetishism. Food fetishism. Nude scuba diving. A gentleman’s club that offer lovely handmaidens for stressed businessmen. Painters using nude women as their canvases.

No movie such as this would be complete without a witchcraft in the modern world segment. Here we get two - white magic and black magic. Fortunately both kinds of magic require beautiful young ladies to get naked. If you can’t attract an audience with nude witches you’re just not cut out to be a filmmaker.

There are also UFO cultists and they’re always fun. These ones are so crazy it takes one’s breath away. There are hippies. And there’s an insane entertainer who is insane in ways you never imagined were possible. You might be wondering if the Chariots of the Gods craze gets a mention. It does. Yes, ancient astronauts.

People today believe just as many crazy things as people in the 70s (people in every generation believe different crazy things) but the crazy things people believed in then were totally different, and more fun.

This movie’s appeal at the time was obviously the copious quantities of nudity. Today it’s a fascinating time capsule. It’s so very very 1970s. Guys with long hair. Women with hair, well you know where women had hair back then. 70s fashions. 70s cultural attitudes guaranteed to make twenty-somethings of today burst into tears. 1970s Sydney street scenes. Sydney’s notorious red-light district, King’s Cross, in all its seedy sleazy 70s glory. Surfer’s Paradise in the 70s. And that attitude to sex - that it was naughty but lots of fun.

No mondo film was ever meant to be taken seriously and this one is no exception. There’s some obviously genuine footage and plenty of obviously staged footage.

Lamond went on to make the best of all Emmanuelle clones, Felicity, in 1978.

I’d love to be able to report that there’s a fully restored special edition Blu-Ray but sadly that hasn’t happened. Your best bet is the old Umbrella Entertainment DVD double feature which also includes Lamond’s 1978 follow-up, The ABC of Love and Sex Australian Style (this DVD is still available). The transfer is letterboxed and not fantastic but this is the kind of movie that is more fun to watch if the print looks a bit scuzzy.

That time capsule element is certainly the reason to see this film. It’s just like being back in the 70s! If that appeals to you you’ll enjoy Australia After Dark.

The idea of a mondo film focused on sex was not exactly original back in 1976. British filmmakers Arnold L. Miller and Stanley A. Long made several in the 60s, beginning with West End Jungle (1961) and continuing with London in the Raw (1965), Primitive London (1965). Their sexy mondo films are actually quite entertaining.

Secret Rites (1971)

Secret Rites makes an interesting companion piece to Malcolm Leigh’s Legend of the Witches (1970) so the BFI’s decision to release them as a double-header DVD/Blu-Ray combo set makes a lot of sense.

Both are faux-documentaries dealing with witchcraft in contemporary England. Both movies add lots of exploitation elements to the mix and it was clearly these exploitation elements that attracted the audience. Secret Rites seems to have done quite well at that time although it had been largely forgotten until the BFI discovered to its surprise that it actually had a very good print in its archive.

Interestingly the cast members include some real witches and some actors, some with backgrounds in sex films and some with more conventional acting backgrounds. The line between fiction film and documentary is constantly being blurred.

Secret Rites, in comparison with Legend of the Witches, focuses much more tightly on scenes of witchcraft rituals.

While Legend of the Witches was shot in black-and-white and looks ultra-cheap Secret Rites was shot in colour and has more of a feature film look.

The running time is just 47 minutes although it is possible that a much longer much racier continental version may have been shot. This was a not uncommon practice at the time. There is no way of knowing if this was the case. Derek Ford did however follow this practice later in his career and even on occasions included hardcore footage.

Director Derek Ford made quite a few sex comedies in the 70s which, sadly, apparently embarrassed him. A very British attitude indeed.

Secret Rites begins with a very pretty typical British dollybird deciding she wants to become a witch. She writes to Alex Sanders, who was in real life Britain’s most famous witch at that time, making enquiries about joining his coven. He suggests that she talk to Wendy, a member of the coven.

Her application to join the coven having been accepted she goes through her initiation ritual.

Other rituals will follow, including a temporary marriage ritual and a kind of eternal marriage ritual. Almost all of the film’s running time is taken up by these ceremonies.

The tone is very serious throughout. This may have reflected Alex Sanders’ approach. He was working very hard at that time to give witchcraft a favourable public image. In those more enlightened times that seemed like a perfectly achievable objective.

It may also have been an attempt to head off censorship problems, presenting this film as a serious documentary.

Censorship problems were certainly a possibility as there is an enormous amount of both male and female frontal nudity. It’s all very non-sexual but there are a lot of naked bodies.

In 1971 there were fascinating linkages becoming evident between the counter-culture on the one hand and the occult and various alternative religions on the other. This is a theme that is definitely present in the film. Secret Rites takes place in Notting Hill, then a major counter-culture centre.

Secret Rites has a very lurid visual style, looking more like a Hammer film with extra nudity (a lot of extra nudity) than a documentary. The visual style is rather fun and the witches wear some rather exotic costumes (when they wear clothes at all).

Secret Rites works well enough as a documentary about Alex Sanders’ brand of Wicca. It’s sympathetic and avoids sensationalism.

It also works pretty well as a sexploitation movie with lots of pretty young lady witches in a state of undress.

If you enjoy offbeat faux-documentaries done in a lurid style this movie is highly recommended.

The BFI’s Blu-Ray presentation looks terrific with nicely vivid colours (it’s a very colourful movie).

Legend of the Witches (1970)

Legend of the Witches is an odd faux-documentary mixed with sexploitation written and directed by Malcolm Leigh and released in 1970.

It was shot 1.33:1 and in black-and-white and clearly on a very very small budget.

It’s an interesting mixture, with a mostly very serious tone and very portentous narration. On the whole it’s sympathetic to witchcraft.

Witchcraft was at the time a popular subject in fiction and in movies so this film would have a certain built-in commercial appeal.

We start with what is supposedly the witches’ creation myth. Then we go to an initiation ritual for a new witch priest.

Then we get a kind of potted European history from the witches’ point of view, with William the Conqueror, Robin Hood and Joan of Arc all featuring as witches or involved in witchcraft.

Next up is an account of the many survivals of pagan ritual in Christian ritual. These two historical interludes are the most interesting part of the film although one might be justified in being sceptical about their historical accuracy.

We get a visit to a witchcraft museum in Cornwall. Plus several more re-enactments of witchcraft rituals. Finally we get some very strange not very relevant stuff about scientific ghost-hunting and scientific investigations of psychic powers. This stuff might not be relevant but it is an excuse for some appealing trippiness.

This was 1970, with the hippie thing in full swing, and one can see signs of the  mutual influence that was becoming apparent between occult groups and some branches of hippiedom.

And along the way we get prodigious amounts of male and female frontal nudity.

The impression it all leaves is that there was an attempt being made to make a fairly serious documentary but with lots of exploitation elements to make it saleable. One assumes that the serious documentary elements were there mainly to provide a justification for lots of nudity, and presumably in the hope that this would somehow get the movie past the rigid British film censors.

There’s a total absence of humour. That might have been a deliberate ploy to make the film seem like a serious respectable documentary.

Alex Sanders, the most high-profile practising witch in England at the time and something of a celebrity, was involved in the making of the film. Much of the ritual shown in the film is therefore likely to be a fairly accurate representation of the practises of Sanders’ brand of Wicca.

Being shot on a micro-budget in black-and-white turns out to be something of an asset in disguise, adding to the cinéma vérité documentary feel. Overall the film probably needed to be tightened up a bit in the editing room. A bit more liveliness wouldn’t have hurt.

Malcolm Leigh had a brief career as a director mostly of short subjects, being best-known for his 1971 sex comedy Games That Lovers Play (which starred Joanna Lumley).

The BFI have paired this film with a similar witchcraft faux-documentary, Secret Rites, in their excellent DVD/Blu-Ray combo Flipside series. The transfer is as good as can be expected considering that the movie probably didn’t look great even at the time of its initial release. There are plenty of extras although they’re a mixed bag.

Legend of the Witches was typical of its time with some obvious affinities to British mondo-style films such as London in the Raw (1965) and Primitive London (1965) but it takes itself much more seriously.

Legend of the Witches is intriguing enough to be recommended.

Primitive London (1965)

The Italian mondo films of the early 60s (starting with Mondo Cane) were hugely popular and triggered off a rash of similar films. Arnold L. Miller enjoyed considerable success with London in the Raw in 1964, a kind of mondo film looking at the sleazy side of London. He followed it up with Primitive London in 1965.

Primitive London is very much a mondo film. It’s like an anthropological tour of the English capital, focusing on the strange customs of the natives. There’s a strip club, then a school for strippers. Then we get a topless fashion show, with topless evening dresses and topless bathing costumes.

The range of topics covered is bewildering, from women’s judo to hairdressing, from tattooing to Turkish baths, from beauty contests to prostitution to the most exclusive hatters in London.

Youth subcultures get quite a bit of attention. Mods, rockers and beatniks. I was surprised there were still beatniks in 1965 although many of them look like proto-hippies. In 1965 there was ongoing hysteria in the British press about violence between mods and rockers with both subcultures being regarded as dangerous and frightening.

There are also chickens and goldfish undergoing emergency surgery.

We learn that pinball machines are a symptom of social degradation.

The movie fearlessly confronts the greatest social evil of all, stand-up comedy.

And of course there is a key party. Wife-swapping was a popular subject for exploitation film-makers and writers of sleaze fiction and you could easily get the impression that it was a craze sweeping the western world.

The general tone is moralising and disapproving. As every exploitation film-maker from the 1930s to the 1970s knew, the moral disapproval was an essential ingredient. It was essential to keep the censors at bay, but it also made for sensationalism and sensationalism is what these films were all about. The moralising served the purpose of making what was often rather tame material seem shocking and exciting. It made the viewer feel delightfully naughty and daring.

The moralising reaches a fever pitch of hysteria when it comes to the wife-swapping. This is just so wicked and depraved. It’s so wicked and depraved we had to make a movie about it.

And then, for no reason whatsoever, we get a re-enactment of the Jack the Ripper murders.

Mondo movies were not supposed to make sense. The whole point was to throw as many bizarre ingredients into the pot as possible. That’s the approach taken here. If you’re bored by a particular segment don’t worry, within a couple of minutes the movie will have moved on to something different and totally unrelated. And you have to keep watching because you have no idea what will come next.

Another attraction of mondo movies of course is that you never know exactly how much is real and how much is fake.

There’s an attempt to inject some humour into the proceedings with an ongoing sketch about a television commercial and with the producer and editing arguing over what should be included in the movie.

The main attraction of this movie is the glimpse it offers into the seedy glamorous world of Soho strip clubs in the mid-60s. It’s obvious that some (possibly most) of the strip-tease routines are real but it’s likely they were toned way down for the movie. Or perhaps not. Given the oppressive atmosphere of the time and the restrictiveness of British laws in the 60s maybe this really was all they could get away with. It’s still fascinating.

Arnold L. Miller was also responsible for West End Jungle and went to to make Secrets of a Windmill Girl.

Stanley A. Long, who did the cinematography, went on to direct sex comedies in the 70s.

The BFI have done a great job with the DVD release (and they’ve released this one on Blu-Ray as well). Image quality is superb.

The extras are in some ways even more interesting than the main feature. There are three interviews from the late 60s. Nightclub owner Al Burnett explains in detail the intricacies and inanities of British licensing and gambling laws. Nightclub owner Stuart McCabe has some fascinating things to say about the stupidities of British laws governing prostitution and gives us his views on how a strip club should be run honestly and with a bit of class. Stripper Shirley gives us some insights into the motivations of the stripper. Finally there’s a 26-minute short film by John Irvin, Carousella, about the lives of three strippers. It’s both surprisingly sympathetic and well-made.

Primitive London is oddly fascinating and I recommend it although obviously you have to like this type of cinematic oddity.

London in the Raw is worth a look as well.

Pervertissima (1972)

Writer-director Jean-Louis van Belle’s Pervertissima was released in 1972. If you’ve seen the other Jean-Louis van Belle movie (The Lady Kills) included in Mondo Macabro’s two-movie Jean-Louis van Belle Blu-Ray release then you’ll be confidently looking forward to a fair amount of weirdness and perversity. Which you do get, in a way, but it’s a very very different movie from The Lady Kills. Pervertissima is a kind of kinky mondo movie, but with some science fiction elements as well.

Françoise (Maelle Pertuzo) is a pretty twenty-three-year old who has applied for a position as an investigative journalist. This is of course a skilled and specialised occupation so her prospective employer has to be sure that she is properly qualified for the job. He asks her to take her clothes off. Having seen her naked he feels reassured that she is indeed very highly qualified.

Her first assignment is to do a feature on Love in Paris. Her employer is certain she’s right for this assignment since she is a virgin.

What she has to do is to seek out the strange and unusual in the sexual world of Paris. Her first step is an orgy, which she observes through a peep-hole while hidden in a cupboard. Then she gets a job as a stripper at the cabaret Le Sexy. The strip-tease sequence is very strange but very cleverly shot. It’s very disorienting and you don’t get to see any nudity in this scene but it certainly sets an atmosphere of outrageousness.

Then she finds work as a street walker. Her one and only client has odd tastes. He wants her to dress in a bridal gown and then rape him. She does her best (journalists are dedicated).

Then she tries being a call girl, with similarly kinky results.

Things then get stranger, with Françoise infiltrating a bizarre erotico-mystico-psycho-physique poetry and sex cult.

She visits a lesbian indoor bathing club, and barely escapes with her virtue intact.

And then the movie changes gear in a rather startling way.

We’re now in mad scientist territory, with the mad scientist in question, Dr Vilard, working towards turning people into robots and then getting them to mate.

While the first half of the movie has a seedy glamour the second half gets much more grungy and with some grotesquerie.

There’s plenty of nudity, including some frontal nudity, but not much sex (the orgy scene is fairly tame although not as tame as the orgy scenes frequently encountered in 1960s American sexploitation flicks.

Even in an era which allowed cinematic mavericks and eccentrics to thrive Jean-Louis van Belle stands out for his intriguingly offbeat approach to film.

Maelle Pertuzo’s film career was very brief. She’s certainly lovely and she does give the impression of being an odd girl who actually enjoys her strange assignment and regards the world of kinky sex with amused detachment. She also has the right look - she looks great in the fashions of the time. She can wear thigh-high boots and a mini-skirt with confidence. She also takes her clothes off quite a lot and looks just as good naked as clothed. Maelle Pertuzo has to carry the film and has to make us care what this odd girl will get into next. Which she does. She might not have been much of an actress but she was right for this film. The other cast members don’t get a lot to do but there are some bizarre bit players.

Apart from the brief scene in Le Sexy this movie is not all that startling visually, and it features the lamest mad scientist laboratory in cinema history. It’s a set that belongs in an Ed Wood Jr movie. The mad scientist laboratory does feature naked girls though, so I guess that’s something.

There’s really no plot at all, just a succession of weird stuff happening.

Mondo Macabro’s Blu-Ray offers a good anamorphic transfer and it’s a two movies on one disc release, the other movie being another Jean-Louis van Belle feature, The Lady Kills (1971). There are some reasonably worthwhile extras as well (as there always are in a Mondo Macabro release). It’s the sort of release that makes Mondo Macabro so essential to cult film fans - two movies that nobody else would have even thought of releasing bizarre but they’re fascinatingly bizarre.

Pervertissima defies categorisation, although mondo film probably fits the bill most accurately. It’s not as good as The Lady Kills, but it is weirder.