EDITOR’S NOTE: Today’s movie is brought to you by Eddie R., who subscribed at the Big B&S’er tier.
Would you like me to write about the movies of your choice? It’s simple!
- Visit Ko-Fi.
- Join as a monthly member for just $1. That makes you a Little B&S’er.
- As a Medium B&S’er at just $3 a month, if you pick a movie or a director, I’ll write about them for you. In fact, I’ll do one for each month you subscribe and even dedicate the post to you.
- For $5 a month, you basically get some major power. As a Big B&S’er, I’ll write an entire week on any subject you’d like. Every month, if you’d like.
Thanks for picking this, Eddie R. It was very much a blind spot!
Janine Talbot (Delvene Delaney in her only full-length theatrical role, but she’d go on to be a TV game show presenter) is hitchhiking through Australia, but please — spoilers all over this — don’t get to know her. Whoever has picked her up, she instantly begins to make love to them, even calling out how quick they’re moving, but not stopping them. Then, without warning, she’s dead.
Was it merchant sailor Mark Gifford (John Waters, a child star who was on the Aussie TV show Play School for twenty years; since then, he’s done a one-man show about John Lennon), who has disposed of the body? Or perhaps his brother, Robert (George Mallaby, mostly known for playing a police officer on Homicide, The Box and Cop Shop in Australia; he also owned the first hazelnut farm Down Under; sadly, Mallaby spent the last four years of his life in a wheelchair after a series of strokes), a tense young man confined to a wheelchair?
These adopted brothers spend most of the movie literally at war with one another, mainly because they’re both in love with their cousin, Margaret (Belinda Giblin, who was on the Australian TV show Sons and Daughters). Despite the fact that Robert doesn’t have use of his legs, he’s really rough on his brother, who the police suspect in a series of hitchhiker murders beyond the one we’ve seen in the opening of this film.
Based on Russell Braddon’s novel, which was set in England, this was directed and written by Tim Burstall as a two-lead, single-location film that could be done on a budget while he prepped the film Eliza Fraser (which also stars Waters and Mallaby). He may be better known for movies like Stork, Alvin Purple and Attack Force Z, at least in the U.S.
There are so many issues here: Robert is about to get worse, losing the use of his arms, so his brother will be fully in charge of him. And yet he despises Mark, who has taken his girlfriend from him. Most of the film is a menacing battle of emotions between the two men, but by the end, things get awfully bloody. And as always, things may not be as they seem when it comes to who the killer is, despite this seemingly telling us who the guilty man is right at the beginning. After all, the poster says that this is a film “in the Hitchcock tradition.”
Between this, Road Games and Fair Game, my personal vision of Australia is a lawless land where women are constantly in danger of being murdered. Or being killed and then dressed up and kept in someone’s house before it’s taken to a theater and placed in a seat to watch a ripoff of A Clockwork Orange. If you look, Delaney is both blinking and breathing when she should be deceased, but don’t let that distract you from this movie.
End Play works because it messes with the previously called out Hitchcock tradition, “it claims to follow. By showing us a disposal of a body early on, it tricks the audience into a false sense of moral superiority. We think we know who the monster is. The film then spends 90 minutes making us second-guess exactly who the villain is, as well as the mental stability of both men.
What should we call Australian giallo? Down Under Sunburnt Gothic? Moscato Giallo?
You can watch this on Tubi.
B&S About Movies 