The most important thing about writer/director Mark Hartley's brilliant documentary feature on Aussie genre cinema in the '70s and '80s is perhaps the fact that this passage of local screen history has for so long been overlooked, undervalued or deliberately ignored by critics and academics. But those wanting an earnest dissertation on such pics celebrated here like Brian Trenchard-Smith's splatter-fest Turkey Shoot or John Lamond's skin flick Felicity or the late Richard Franklin's thriller Roadgames can go stuff their head in a book. The best thing about Hartley's film is that he has found the perfect form to investigate this past and pay a sweet homage to his cast of ratbag filmmakers, who deliberately tested the boundaries of good taste and political correctness.

Using clips from over eighty movies and a huge international cast captured in very candid interviews (including a frenetic Quentin Tarantino), Not Quite Hollywood, simply put, is a blast. Hartley, who has a background in music clips and commercials, has adapted the somewhat stilted format of the "films about filmmaking" sub-genre to create a big screen, totally cinematic experience that perfectly expresses the wild and excessive sensibility that he's exploring. Hartley adopts a relentless pace to the narrative that never lets up; uses hilarious animation throughout to set an irreverent tone; and scores a lot of the action with retro-rock like Rose Tattoo's "We Can't Be Beaten". Hartley also makes a crucial insight about genre filmmaking and the "culture wars" of the '70s and '80s that has deep relevance today; namely that genre filmmaking, for so long considered a dirty word amongst Australian movie power brokers, can be just as idiosyncratic, relevant and rich as so-called "personal" filmmaking.