Turkey Shoot

This B-grade exploitation film combines sci-fi and action to posit a near future where Australia has become a police state run by corrupt and despotic government officials. We follow a small group of subversive characters as they get thrown into special prison camp 47 where 'deviants' like themselves can be 're-educated'. The 'turkey shoot' of the film's title refers to a hunting game set up by Camp Master Thatcher (Michael Craig), where he extends an offer of freedom to five prisoners. To win they must stay alive until sundown, whilst Thatcher and his privileged pals hunt them for sport. The prisoners might be labelled 'deviants' but it's their hunters (a smug elite cabal of sadists, sociopaths and rapists) who are the real deviants.

First off, anyone watching this in the expectation of an intelligent Orwellian vision of a totalitarian Australia is going to be sorely disappointed. Turkey Shoot only really touches on the basics of dystopian fiction, IE. Control through fear, all-powerful governments, lots of nehru collars and boiler suits. It's pretty much just an easy framework to facilitate gratuitous nudity, violence and lots of cool explosions. American Steve Railsbeck plays Paul, the prisoner 'they can't break', and he comes across as vaguely annoying with his non-stop preaching. He should've gone for a more stoic, Steve McQueen approach - the script just isn't really up to it when it comes to any kind of moral high ground, and his philosophising is cartoonish at best. He's partnered by Olivia Hussey (from the 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet), who spends most of the film looking like a rabbit caught in headlights. It's no acting either, apparently she was quite frightened of the Australian bush during filming. The rest of the characters are vividly two-dimensional, and there are stacks of inventively gory deaths in store for them as the film pounds along (it swings into outright slasher territory on more than one occasion).


One of my favourite moments is when alpha-guard Ritter (Roger Ward) starts throwing mock punches at a young woman as she haltingly recites a pro-government mantra. It's so ridiculous and campy that it's hard to take it seriously, which I suspect was the intention of the filmmakers. A serious version of this film, with more realistic levels of violence, would no doubt be quite boring in comparison. The image of Alph the slobbering circus freak stalking a slimy prisoner in coke-bottle glasses at the foot of rainforest-covered mountains, scenes of Ritter grinning triumphantly as he gloats at the edge of a burning sugar cane field, or Stan from Hey Dad making a brave last stand as he's struck full of futuristic-looking arrows... well, you just can't see these sort of things anywhere else. As much as Turkey Shoot is all surface and no subtext, it's wonderfully colourful and unpretentious.

DIRECTOR: Brian Trenchard-Smith
WRITER/SOURCE: David Lawrence, George Schenck and Robert Williams.
KEY ACTORS: Steve Railsbeck, Olivia Hussey, Michael Craig, Carmen Duncan, Roger Ward, Bill Young, Gus Mercurio, Noel Ferrier, Lynda Daniels

RELATED TEXTS:
- The original human-hunts-human story was The Most Dangerous Game, a 1920s novel that has become the basis for at least twenty films over the years.
- A lot of the idealogy for Turkey Shoot is casually ripped off from Nineteen Eighty-Four and it's many pretenders.
- Brian Trenchard-Smith made a career for himself in the 1970s and 1980s directing exploitative action films that have come to be known as 'ozploitation' films. The stories behind these films have been covered in the documentary Not Quite Hollywood. Aside from Turkey Shoot, his other major ozploitation films are The Man From Hong Kong, Day of the Assassin, Stunt Rock, Dead-End Drive In, Day of the Panther, Strike of the Panther and Out of the Body.