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Category:    Home > Reviews > Prison > Science Fiction > Drama > Australia > Ghosts ...Of The Civil Dead (1988/Umbrella Entertainment/Region Zero/0/PAL DVD)

Ghosts … Of The Civil Dead  (1988/Region Zero/0/Free/PAL DVD/Umbrella Entertainment)

 

Picture: B-     Sound: B-     Extras: B     Film: B

 

 

PLEASE NOTE: This is a DVD that can only be operated on machines capable of playing back DVDs that can handle Region Zero/0/Free and the PAL format software, and was originally issued by our friends at Umbrella Entertainment when we covered this years ago.  Since then, the makes have come up with hits like Lawless, The Proposition and The Road.  Here is the original review text…

 

 

Did Australia produce a film so potent and controversial that it could not be handled by an American distributor?   Well, especially considering it was released in 1988, that could very well be said of John Hillcoat’s Ghosts …Of The Civil Dead.  This was more than a prison film, as brutal as anything that had been seen before, or until the classic HBO-produced Oz series.  This still holds up very well because it offers so much more about how brutal and disturbing the social question of the most hardened and dangerous criminals is dealt with in any major industrialized nation.

 

It took a long time to catch up to this gem, not even issued on the old 12” LaserDisc format and who wants to watch VHS or Beta?  Not seeing it booked nearby in all these years, it was great to get our hands on it here and the film is one of the strongest films we have seen from Australia or New Zealand since Mad Max or Lee Tamahori’s 1995 groundbreaker Once Were Warriors.  This film involves the toughest prisoners in Australia, intended to be now, but looking like the near-future or soon-to-be-future of Science Fiction cinema.  However, this film is not a mere genre piece, but a deep examination of the darkest side of prison life that had only been previously seen in documentaries and retroactively in Don Siegel’s 1979 drama Escape From Alcatraz with Clint Eastwood.

 

The prison in question, called The Central Industrial Prison, is set in the middle of a desert so escape is much tougher than just a body of water, as it had been in Alcatraz.  The guards and prisoners are having their buttons pressed, in every way from literally to figuratively, on the federal level.  The film, co-written by Gene Conkie, Evan English, Hillcoat and Nick Cave, goes out of its way to be as honest and brutal as necessary without being exploitive or overdoing it.  Frontal male nudity was more shocking then, but even that is not played up by being overlit and shown for “money shot” effect.  Along with the sterile setting and the portrayal of violence in an honest-but-non-Hollywood way, the film is at least a minor classic.

 

That is simply because there is some solid storytelling here and it offers some great advantages a show like Oz cannot because of the TV grind and need to continue the story on and on.  At times, I was reminded of J. Lee Thompson’s underrated, impressive 1972 Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes, which has its own “serial sequel” issues.  This is like nothing you have ever seen before and one way to think about it is that it does not allow the subject of these prisoners being trapped to become a celebrated ugliness.  It never glorifies things, never introduces enough of the Gangster genre to ever make this seem like a place you would want to be or could survive and thrive in, does not send a message that the whole world is rotten and bad things happen all the time in a way that it is telegraphed to the audience.  It does not perpetuate a sense of terrorism to hit the viewer on the head with.  It does not assume it knows reality, something Oz eventually runs into problems with, which is why it ran out of room before it should have to make great shows, despite some great seasons.

 

The full frame image is from a good 35mm print, and since it is in the PAL format, is a bit richer and thicker than usual, translating well on all the NTSC monitors it played back on that could handle it.  It also played well on digital HD monitors and PC screens.  Co-lensed by cinematographers Paul Goldman and Graham Wood, then processed in an Australian lab, it has a look unlike just about any film you will see.  This, along with director John Hillcoat’s loss of some detail control of the misé-en-scene, is the reason this is sometimes considered a science fiction film.  One quote even sited George Lucas’ original THX-1138 (1971), which is high complement indeed.

 

The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo sound nicely reproduces the original Dolby A-type analog stereo surround the film was originally issued with theatrically, including the fine score by Nick Cave, Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld.  The music is so rich, that a 5.1 Dolby and DTS mix could have been done, something to consider for a digital High Definition version down the line.

 

Extras are extensive and are often cross-referenced.  On the main extras menu, five subsections exist:  Interviews, Nick Cave, Production, Promotion, and Criticism.  Hillcoat, English, Cave and Bargeld’s old and new interview segments are included.  These include some audio-only pieces in some cases, and video interviews either from the time of the film (1988) or for this DVD release.  After the section all to cave, Production is broken down into: Concept & Research, Filmmakers, Cast, Storyboards, Photographs, and Music & Sound.  In that, you get four music-only pieces of the original soundtrack, and four David Hale dialogue pieces explained as part of the roots of this project.  Promotion gives us the Australian and French trailers, print promotion (in Europe), Venice & Cannes introductions (which has seven slides and a nine-minutes-long piece about their arrest for their posters being mistaken for political agit-prop), and a list of the many other Festivals in initially appeared.  A trailer for Chopper with Eric Bana is also included, as Mick Harvey did the score for both films, and is included as one of three other trailers in the Australian Prison Films section besides one for the main film here.  The other two are 1988’s Stir and 1994’s Everynight… EverynightGhosts …Of The Civil Dead deserves to be discovered as much as that film was, which happened even before Bana landed up in ill-fated big-budget films like The Hulk and Troy.  Umbrella Entertainment has created a very loaded, extremely collectible DVD.

 

As for the Science Fiction approach, it may take a somewhat documentary approach, but the use of computer writing on screen to explain events and the ironically colorful look of the prison, along with the “otherworldness” achieved on little budget, the antiseptic nature of space and honest violence put it there by default.  Hillcoat needs to understand a Science Fiction film does not have to take place in the future, as Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) and Francois Truffaut’s version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) prove.  Between some of the technology, as simple as it is here, looking a bit futuristic (especially for 1988) and guards who look like fireman/football players, Science Fiction comes to mind more than documentary or news items.  The design of the prison on top of colors is another.  Then there is the dangerous assumption that, because the news always tells us of bad news, that “we would hear about this if it happened” as if we the public were always told what was going on.  Some people are amazingly naïve.  Ghosts …Of The Civil Dead makes a strongly contrary point, even if viewers often miss it.  The good news is that, because Hillcoat had the production look he intended, the film will hold up visually for many more years than he may have intended.

 

 

For more Hillcoat/Cave filmmaking, see our coverage of their critical and commercial hit Lawless at this link for its Blu-ray release:

 

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/11928/Lawless+(2012/Anchor+Bay/Weinstei

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo


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