1978 - STUNT ROCK, a tribute to a stuntman

Stunt Rock is for the most part barely a film.  It seems to have been made has a tribute to one of Australia's best and probably craziest stuntman, Grant Page.  What plot there is in this film has Page traveling to America to do stunts for some lame action TV series.  At the same time Page visits his cousin who is part of a heavy metal rock band called Sorcery. Sorcery's shows are full of elaborate magic stunts in some kind of good vs evil thing musical act.

Page hooks up with two women, one a reporter played by Margaret Trenchard-Smith, the director's wife and actor Monique van de Ven playing herself.  Monique van de Ven was associated with over the top Dutch director Paul Verhoeven in several films.  I frankly have no idea what these two women are doing in this film.

 

Stunt Rock is basically film clips of Grant Page performing stunts in various Australian films.  Page seems to have a thing about being set on fire as a number of stunts are of him running around while burning up.  This stuff is inter cut with musical numbers from Sorcery for no apparent reason.  Most of the stunts are shown in split screen.  The director Brian Trenchard-Smith has admitted that the stunts were filmed in 16 mm and would have looked very grainy blown up in to 35 mm.  For this film the decision was made to go with split screen.

Stunt Rock apparently has sort of a cult following but it seems more like someone's home movies edited together in an effort to pass it off as a feature film.

The film was written by Brian Trenchard-Smith and Paul-Michel Mielche Jr., although saying this film is "written" is really stretching it.  The running time is 86 minutes.

1975 - THE MAN FROM HONG KONG, excellent action film

The director Brian Tenchard Smith's first film is an action and stunt movie overload.  The plot is the simple hook of sending a fish out of water Hong Kong cop to Australia to take down an a drug kingpin.

 The film's star Jimmy Wang Yu was kind of the replacement for Bruce Lee who was planned as the original star.  Wang Yu is quite a character in his own right a tough actor with a short temper not afraid to get in a brawl with anyone in real life.

Anyway, back to the film.  Since this was Trenchard Smith's first film  he loaded it up with lots of shooting, fights, car chases etc.  The film doesn't have a dull moment.  Surprisingly the film didn't do that well commercially.  This was attributed to the amount of female nudity which apparently limited the viewing audience. 

 The cast is loaded with Australian actors chiefly Hugh Keays-Byrne and Roger Ward from the first Mad Max film.  One time James Bond George Lazenby is the villain.

The film runs 106 minutes and was written by Brian Trenchard-Smith.