All the little devils are proud of hell

April 01, 2018

All the little devils are proud of hell

Have a drink, mate?

Have a fight, mate?

Have a taste of dust and sweat, mate?

There’s nothing else out here.

This is hot, rotting flesh going rancid in the sun cinema. This is ochre and amber, sweaty, dusty and humid cinema. It's STRAW DOGS. It's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it's horrors in the daylight, ones in front of your face. Horrors that could come from the milkman, the neighbor, the schoolteacher, maybe even [dun] [Dun] [DUN] ...you? The things men are capable of! The things men DO! It's revolting, it's sick and don't you forget it. What bubbles beneath the kitschy veneer? What manages to ooze its way out?

The Yabba! It's the heartland. It's The Naked Kiss's Grantville, it's Twin Peaks. John sees himself differently than he sees his rural, mining town brothers. It's me versus them and I'm better than this! John is above this, at least until he's offered something. You learn a lot about about a man when they're under pressure and we're learning that all these men are exactly the same. We're animals. We're Australian! And we're all more than capable of committing acts of horror. The decline into depravity isn't steady, it's quick and it's steep.

John Grant is a schoolteacher who gambles his money away on his layover to Sydney. Didn't take long! This film is all about timing. Fate is incredibly precise, and more often than not, tragic. He calls heads and wins! But on a technical foul must re-toss. Fate doesn't repeat itself when its come. There’s no last call, so he tosses again and loses it all. The camera swoops and spins and makes you dizzy but the editing is so fast and sharp you're never disoriented.

**I truly don't understand how gambling is or has ever been legal...

STAG NIGHT TO SHAG NIGHT! The climax of the film follows a night of drunken debauchery where men are truly at their most evil which starts with hunting for sport ('roo shootin') and ends with gay sex that perhaps wasn't coercive but definitely not consensual. What does it mean to be a man? The only thing more macho than fist fighting a kangaroo, in my opinion, would be two fellas sticking their penises in each other and that's the tea. Yikes!

How does this open landscape feel so constraining?? Claustrophobic in wide open expansive spaces. You ever felt so dwarfed, so small in comparison, so helpless against the land? The Desert does everything it can to kick your ass and the Outback is always looking to pick a fight. All this latent homosexual wants is to get the heck outta Dodge and see his gf in her red-hot swimsuit!! But maybe he fits right in in the Yabba, maybe it's his fate. Maybe he's right where he belongs.

**This movie taught me that everyone in Australia is beautiful and blonde and brawny

It's a haunted film. Made just before the Australian film revival with no government funding. It opened in America in one theatre on the east side of New York on a sunday, in a blizzard. The print was lost and the film forgotten. The editor of the film Anthony Buckley, between jobs, for thirteen years searched for the print then finds a negative in a warehouse, in Pittsburgh labeled in two boxes in big red letters "FOR DESTRUCTION."