The Five Weirdest Forgotten Classics Of Australian Cinema
When we do weird, we do pretty bloody weird.
Pure Shit, Bert Deling (1975)
Upon its release, the Melbourne Herald critic dubbed Pure Shit “the most evil film I’ve ever seen”. Police raided theatres and shut it down. It’s filmmakers called it “comedy in a black vein”. I call it an early Australian slacker film about nasal-voiced, drug-addled plebs who are disturbingly similar to many of my housemates over the years.
The plot can be summed up in one beautiful line: a bunch of tragic junkies run around 1970s Melbourne over one weekend, trying to find more heroin (‘pure shit’). The end. The whole thing is so amazingly chaotic and grim, it makes you realise there’s something incredible about a country that can combine boganism and bohemia into one mega-bleak sub-culture: the junkie underclass.
Like Wake in Fright, it’s taken thirty-odd years for this super low-budget, no-bullshit cult tale to be recognised as an all-time classic. Forget your cinephile snobbery: this is down and dirty filmmaking. This is Australia as a nightmare, and it’s a funny, bleak attack on the conservative values that remain dominant and even more extreme today.
Pure Shit is not an optimistic film. It pushes liberalism and non-judgmentalism to absurd limits by giving its characters only one form of escape from the the invincible white-bread suburbs: extreme addiction It’s a little bit like the final scene of Dancing in the Dark by Lars Von Trier: you realise that the worst really is going to eventuate, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. Also, a young Helen Garner makes a bowl-cut, bell-bottomed cameo. Perfect.
WATCH IT: There’s a full-on 3-disc DVD rerelease through Beyond Home Entertainment that is sometimes available. Otherwise tee-up an eBay alert. It’s worth it.