It's Gauze!

I love how Alistair's answer just doesn't compute with Fake Gore Gore Girl.

-Drew (via Alistair)

Jucy (2010)

Directed by Louise Alston
Starring Cindy Nelson, Francesca Gasteen
Rated M
Australia 

“A womantic comedy of platonic proportions”

Jackie and Lucy are two 20-something slackers working in Brisbane’s (real, and pretty amazing) cult video superstore, Trash Video. Jackie (Cindy Nelson) is a manic-depressive, Lucy (Francesca Gasteen) is a compulsive eater. Neither are any good at making friends or life decisions, so they pretty much just hang out with each other. After yet another disastrous appearance at a cast (naked!) party for their local theater group, when a snarky nude blonde accuses them of being ‘straight lesbians’ in a ‘womance’ (“That’s the girl version of a bromance”, she helpfully explains), our hapless heroines decide that maybe the mean naked lady is right, and that maybe there’s a world out there beyond flaming-crimson hair-dye and cupcake binges.

And so, Jackie and Lucy both try out for the lead in Jane Eyre. Jackie does so because she thinks it’ll get her laid. Lucy thinks it will be her ticket to fame and/or fortune. To prepare, Lucy meticulously rehearses her lines. Jackie takes a different route: she stops taking her psych meds.

The audition happens. One of ‘em gets the role, one of ‘em loses her mind. And then things get really messy. Throw in a pudgy stalker, a preening douchebag, a few full-on meltdowns, and a synchronized dance (they synchronize dance A LOT in Australian comedies) and you’ve got your basic recipe for either disaster or enlightenment. Or possibly both.

A frothy and likeable cross between Ghost World and Muriel’s Wedding, Jucy is a fun, romp-y coming-of-age comedy. It threatens to dip into tearjerker territory here and there, but mostly it stays light n’ sweet. There’s nothing salacious or sleazy on deck (bummer), but the leads are adorable and it’s almost impossible not to root for ‘em.

- Ken McIntyre 

Dead Calm (1989)

Directed by Phillip Noyce
Starring Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill, Billy Zane
Rated R
Australia

"This is a low production."

Based on a novel with the same title (which, hopefully, fleshed out some of the  WTF moments in the film version), Dead Calm is a thriller-slash-survival horror flick that presages wave (ahem) of ocean-bound cinematic  horrors produced in the wake (again!) of 2003’s Open Water.

Aussie alpha-ginger Nicole Kidman stars as Rae, a perfectly happy wife of a naval officer, John (Sam Neill) and ,mother of a bouncing baby boy. Or, at least she was happy. Rae’s life is shattered to bits in the startling opening scene. Sam is on shore leave for Christmas break, patiently waiting  for Rae and the baby. But they never show up.

Cut to: Rea, driving  through a furious rainstorm to get to her hubby. This kid’s in the back seat, gurgling away. Everything’s hunky dory. But then, the kid pops out of his car seat, mom swerves, there’s another car, and blammo, the kid sails through the windshield – graphically – in a flurry of blood, shattered glass, and baby-brains.

So that’s why she’s late.

So, where the hell do you go from there? Well, the open seas, apparently. To deal with their grief and reconnect, John and Rae head on a sailing boat (with a motor, you know the kind) and  float listlessly in the Great Barrier Reef. Rae gulps down fistfuls of sedatives and occasionally shrieks in her sleep, but what the hell, they’re  working through some heavy stuff.

Their bubble of pain and solitude is burst by the sudden appearance of a mysterious black schooner dead ahead. It appears to be abandoned. The couple  give it a closer look with their binoculars, and Rae spots a solitary figure in a dinghy, rowing  furiously away from the black boat and towards theirs. As he gets closer, they can make him out: a young-ish guy (Billy Zane), clad only in shorts and a straw hat, slathered in sweat and twitching. He’s so desperate to get away from the other ship that he plows right into theirs. Then he jumps aboard, runs downstairs to their cabin, and hides in a corner, wrapped up in a fetal ball.

The couple are more bemused than alarmed. Rae gives the guy some water and, eventually, he starts talking. Says his name is Hughie, and that there were five other people on the black boat, but they all died ten days ago from eating canned salmon.
“Probably Botulism,” says John.
“What the hell is Botulism?” Says Hughie.

John suggests they go back to the black boat to see if anybody’s still alive. Hughie  tells him to forget it, that he’s never going back there again. Which I suppose is understandable, but also a little (damn  it!) fishy, as well. Anyway, Hughie’s tired. Furious rowing is a bitch. John suggests he take a nap in their living quarters, and once he heads in there, John padlocks the door. Just in case. Then he leaves Rae in charge, and takes the dinghy out to check out the black boat.

When he gets to the boat, he finds the naked corpses of several women  and a fat guy floating around. Also, even though the electricity is fried, there’s a TV set on that’s playing  a videotape of the crew’s antics. Turns out that they were all on a Girls-Gone-Wild-on-the-High-seas type of adventure. Four girls, the captain-slash-producer, and Hughie, the cameraman. As the footage rolls on, Hughie gets more paranoid and delusional, until at the end, it’s all just screaming and running and crashing around.

Huh. So it wasn’t salmon. It was crazy Hughie, murdering everyone on board. Hughie. Who’s on the other boat with John’s wife.

Now it’s John’s turn to row frantically. But by the time he gets back, Hughie’s already knocked Rae out and commandeered the vessel. And he’s headed in the opposite direction. John’s forced to head back to the corpse-stuffed black boat – which is now rapidly sinking – and hope for the best.
Meanwhile, terminally depressed Rae has to snap out of it, subdue this lunatic, race back to the black boat, find it in the fuckin’ dark, and rescue John before he sleeps with the fishes.

But how?

Well, first she makes sweet love to Hughie.

Then she wrestles with him in her underwear.

And then she picks up a spear gun, and things get a little nuts.

Dead Calm’s crazy meter dips substantially after the toddler-splattering opening, but the tension level never lets up. It’s almost pornographic in its single-minded obsession with unease. Nobody’s happy, every moment is fraught with fear and violence, and even If the couple survives their ordeal, they’re left with even more trauma than the dead-kid issues they started with. This is one ugly joyride. Zane’s off-the-charts nuts, Neill’s a better action-hero than you might expect, and Kidman – well, even when she’s desperately trying to kill a maniac with a spear gun and she’s covered in bruises and crusty blood, she still looks good. And her hair is amazing.

All in all, a tight, taut, (very) 80’s thriller. Just be ready for some darkness.

- Ken McIntyre

Pacific Banana (1981)

Directed by John Lamond
Starring Graeme Blundell, Robin Stewart, Luan Peters, Deborah Gray
Rated R
Australia

"Are you two-timing me?"
"Yes, of course I am."

Although they've had very little play in the States over the years, Australia has produced its fair share of Boob Cinema. Most notable was 1973's Alvin Purple, starring muppet-faced Graeme Blundell. A classic male sex fantasy, Purple follows the antics and buffoonery of the titular character, a bungling numbskull blessed with neither looks or personality and yet, he's irresistible to women everywhere. This sort of wish-fulfillment premise occasionally showed up in US films as well, but usually the protagonist had to drink a magic potion or sell his soul to the devil. Not in Australia, mate. Down there, ugly dudes don't need no magical powers to pull the birds. They just fockin' pull 'em.

Alvin Purple spawned a sequel and a television series and laid the groundwork for many a tits-out Aussie romp. Fast forward a decade, and folks still couldn't get enough of Blundell's aw-shucks accidental cocksman, and so, Pacific Banana, an Alvin Purple in reverse sorta riff that borrows heavily from that classic Brit-com conceit: the guy whose dick doesn't work.

Martin (Blundell) is a pilot for Blandings Airlines. That's the good news. The bad news is, he suffers from a very particular form of erectile dysfunction. Every time he starts to get amorous with a woman, he sneezes and blows his load. It's a pretty revolting development. When the boss's wife, Lady Blandings (Audine Leith) attempts to seduce him during a private flight, she's thwarted by his wet noodle, so she has him fired. Since similar circumstances have hobbled many a Blandings pilot, Sir Harry Blandings (Alan Hopsgood) shows Martin a little kindness and gets him a co-pilot gig at Banana Airlines, the absolute bottom-scrapers at the Melbourne airport.

Paul (Robin Stewart, Get Crazy), the captain of Banana Airlines' flagship plane, the Pacific Banana, has the exact opposite problem as Martin: he can't stop banging women. When we meet him, he's in bed with a purring Swedish chick while he talks his way out of it on the phone with his fiancés, sexy stews Mandy (Alyson Best) and Sally (Deborah Gray, who also wrote the amazing theme song).

He's somehow engaged to both of the Banana's stewardesses. Is that illegal in Australia? Could be, they're pretty manly down there.

After getting molested by a big-breasted woman who gives him a ride to the airport, Martin meets Paul and his horny gang and sees what he'll be flying for now on. The Pacific Banana is a battered, bright yellow propeller plane that flies from Australia to various island paradises, including Tahiti. "The Spirit of '35" is painted on the nose, which is not very comforting in 1980. As Martin straps in for his first flight, Paul asks him if he's scared. He shakes his head.
"Well, you ought to be," winks Paul. As the plane starts up, Martin looks out the window to see the mechanic on the tarmac praying.

Mandy and Sally wear yellow dresses with slits that go up to their waists. Before the plane takes off, they struggle to secure all the overhead baggage, offering the perfect view for the wrinkly old men and pervy priests on board to ogle them. Meanwhile, our narrator, Martin's fairy godfather, chuckles maniacally on the soundtrack. I'm not sure why we need a narrator, but the whole set-up is pretty awesomely creepy.

I should mention the subplot here. Sir Harry's teenage daughter Julia (Helen Hemingway, who was pushing 30 at the time) stows herself away on every Banana flight. She's attempting to run away from home. Although her disguises and hiding places are relatively clever (an old biddy, a coffin) she continually gets caught, and Martin hands her over to whatever counts as authority on the various islands they land in. The assumption is that this will all lead up to something later, because she serves no real purpose for 95% of the film's running time.

After Paul nips off to have sex with the stews, and after Martin is through tying up Julia and calming down a hysterical, matronly passenger by massaging her giant breasts (it's the only thing that will get her to stop screamining) the bedraggled crew finally gets to its first destination, Tahiti. While there, Paul tries to cure Martin's problem by taking him to an exotic brothel called the House of Joy, where the ladies offer their customers bizarre scenarios like 'The Missionary' (they have sex in a boiling pot), or "The Tarzan' (I think monkeys are involved). Martin is clearly not built for this sort of sex-play. He opts for the rather pedestrian sex-on-a-waterbed option, but sneezes before they can get to business.

Paul is then obliged to bang the island girl himself. Then he goes back to his bungalow and bangs his two fiancés/employees. Paul's fuck-everything routine gets pretty tiresome after awhile.

The following day, Paul sits in the Banana Airlines offices, plotting his next sexual conquest. In stomps Candy Bubbles (Hammer horror hottie Luan Peters) in a low-cut blue dress that accentuates her ample bosom.
"Oh, Christ," says Paul. You will, too.
"Yes, I know they're big," she acknowledges. "Now, take a good look, so we can get down to business."
Candy wants to use the Pacific Banana as the go-to charter plane for her hedonistic resort, Club Candy. Paul agrees - how could he not? - and soon enough, the Banana is packed to the rafters with young nubiles looking for an exotic week in the tropics.

What with all those women on board, you'd expect something sexy to happen. But just when you least expect it, a banana cream pie fight breaks out on the plane. This goes on at least twice as long as usual, so apparently Australians think food fights are uproarious.

After a lengthy cleanup, everyone ends up at Club Candy. Having overheard Martin's troubles on the plane (the two pilots never seem to notice the loudspeaker is on when they talk about sex), Candy offers to help him. She lets him loose in a pile of naked girl-flesh with a paintbrush and they all get squishy creating body-art.

At first it appears to be working, but then he sneezes, and the fun is over. Determined to crack this nut, Candy sends her girls in wave after wave to Martin's room to get a rise out of him. There's a fraulein in leather, a two-girl combo and even a brunette in the bathtub, but nothing works.

Candy realizes, with some amount of trepidation, that she's going to have to handle this one herself.
"For his sake, I will perform the ritual of the sleeping giant," she announces.
"Oh no," squeaks one of the girls. "If it gets out of control, every man on the island will be driven mad with lust!"
"Believe me, I know how risky it is," she says, somberly. "Pray for us both."

The ritual involves dudes playing conga drums blindfolded while Candy does a strip dance in front of Martin. By the way, Luan Peters' may have the most perfect set of double-Ds since Supervixen herself, Shari Eubank. And that's saying something. Those are some prime 70's tits, and it's no wonder that the whole island goes bananas when she starts shaking them around. The islanders all start fucking in the sand, trees topple over, and a volcano erupts. But does the dance work for Martin? And what does all of this have to do with our plucky teenage stowaway?

Hey man, that's for me to know and you to find out. Although it's all pretty obvious.

Pacific Banana is never quite as funny as you'd like it to be, even though it tries, desperately, to make you laugh, with every grown-worthy sex-com gag in the book. On the other hand, the women are frequently naked and uniformly gorgeous, in that understated, well-built Aussie sort of way, the scenery is incredible, and the atmosphere is so warm and sunny you practically need to slather on sunblock just to watch it. So I'm not complaining.

PS: Makes an obvious companion piece to the loopy Party Plane.

More Bananas?
25 or so years later, and most of the cast and crew are all still alive, kicking, and making movies. It takes a lot to kill Australians.

Clip: Pacific Banana trailer!

Availability: Pacific Banana is available on DVD.

-Ken McIntyre