AustLit

The Last of the Knucklemen tells the story of a gang of wild-cat miners living in a camp in outback South Australia. They swear, brawl, gamble, and drink heavily. Central to the story is the conflict between Tarzan, the authoritarian group leader, and cocky, wisecracking, loud-mouth Pansy. This results in a bare-knuckle punch-up at the film's climax.

A buddy comedy in which two carnival workers head off to Surfers Paradise, looking for women and fun, only to find themselves in possession of a suitcase of marijuana and pursued by the suitcase's original owners.

Eliza Fraser tells the real-life story of a Scottish woman, one of eighteen people aboard the HMS Stirling Castle (captained by Fraser's husband) in 1836, when the ship struck a reef and was wrecked several hundred kilometres north of the Queensland island that now bears Fraser's name. The survivors launched a boat and eventually made it to Waddy Point on the island, but they were soon afterwards captured by the local Aboriginal tribe. Stripped of their clothing and forced to endure slave-like conditions, most of the group (including Fraser's husband) either died from starvation or were killed by the tribe. Fraser was eventually found by an escaped convict, John Graham, who had lived for six years with the local Aboriginal people. Graham is said to have won the confidence of his captors by accepting their customs (including nudity). The film's narrative sees Fraser return to 'civilisation,' where she makes a good deal of money in carnival sideshows telling a sensational version of her experiences.

A thriller set around two brothers (one wheelchair bound and obsessed with crossbows, and both with too much leisure time after inheriting a substantial sum from their father) whose involvement in the disappearance of female hitch-hikers around their home town is questionable and sinister.

An exploration of conflict between university-educated middle-class liberalism and self-made working-class values, Petersen sees an electrician and former Aussie Rules football star make a life change by rejecting the 'suburban' values of his former life and 'beer-swilling, ignorant mates' and going to university. He enrolls in an Arts degree and soon finds that his ingenuous, extroverted nature and natural physical aggression make him welcome with fellow students and academic staff alike. He becomes involved in a public demonstration of love-making as a protest against sexual conventions, is involved in a fight with some bikies at a party, and has an affair with a married tutor, Trish. However, when Trish decides to take up an appointment at Oxford and her husband fails him in an examination, Petersen becomes bitter and angered by the betrayal. He subsequently rapes Trish and returns, defeated, to his former career as an electrician.

'With their prize money from helping a team of women cricketers win a match, Alvin and Spike end up in a casino and become entangled in the world of international crime. Alvin then has to cope with gangsters and the continuing attraction he seems to have for women.'

Source: Screen Australia.

Alvin is an average man, except that women find him irresistible. The only woman that Alvin really wants is his platonic friend Tina, but he appears to feel no sexual desire for her. He follows her to a convent, where he gets a job as gardener.

A 'sexist sex comedy', made during the peak of the feminist debate in Australia, Alvin Purple reverses the feminist polemic of men oppressing women by having its protagonist pursued by a constant stream of predatory women. He is victimised even more when he refuses sex. Paul Byrnes (Australian Screen) notes that 'the film was [also] reacting against entrenched puritanical attitudes in Australian society. To some it was prurient farce; to others, it was exposing the repression that produced such prurience.'

Tom O'Regan notes in 'Cinema Oz: The Ocker Films' (1989) that Alvin's 'ordinariness seems irresistible to women. The comedy is based on incongruity. Sex is rendered as slapstick. Jokes are at the expense of bastions of hypocrisy - psychiatry, the press and the law. The would-be recessive hero is the object of male sexual fantasy - sex without responsibility - a fantasy with which women could also apparently identify.'

[Source: Paul Byrnes, Tom O'Regan, and Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper]