Johnny's comments:

An Australian Classics update with two movies from the 90s off VHS.

Powderburn is a 1998 road movie/thriller where Chrissy (Blazey Best) and her friend Brad (Blaise Cooper) arrive back in Australia with Brad becoming violently ill as the stomach full of drug-filled condoms starts to turn on him. They are closely followed by Lily (Olivia Pigeot) and her tongueless partner Joe (Rolando Ramos) who are working for drug trafficker Dex (Ian Bliss) with Lily looking to kill the both of them for the drugs. Well, Brad shits himself to death with the drugs still inside him so Chrissy is fucked but she remembers her old boyfriend Peter (Nic Bishop) is studying medicine and drive over to him to ask for his help but he is none to pleased to see her as Chrissy is a wild one who has a knack of getting into trouble. She manages to convince Peter to cut open Brad but he doesn't have the tools but his veterinarian father who lives in the country does so they go for a drive followed by Lily and Joe and also a corrupt cop Draper (Alan Lovell) who wants his share. The groups play a cat and mouse game across the arid countryside in a desperate attempt to retrieve the drugs and get the money for them, so who's going to get the loot and what that surprise that is waiting for all of them. Remember this movie being one of those Video Ezy releases where they distributed a bunch of low budget Australian movies that might have otherwise be lost in time like a number of films were. Around the same time, road movies were in vogue in Australia with Kiss Or Kill and True Love and Chaos both getting a run and Powderburn is of a similar vein but the budgetary constraints show heavily here. The story is OK and the actors, mostly up-and-comers or solid character actors do alright but the plot of the movie is nonsensical and the road trip plot makes no sense other than to pad out the movie to 90 minutes. There's a 10 minute stretch in the movie that's utterly absurd and is probably the best part of the movie but the movie doesn't play up the absurdity of the situation enough, to it's detriment and it ends up like every Tarantino rip-off did in the 90s which it never needed to. It's not a bad movie but it's plot is too silly and formulaic for it to be a sleeper hit. At least it's better than the execrable True Love And Chaos.

Most of the cast still work pretty regularly today, Blazey Best was recently in the disastrous series Between Two Worlds but had nothing to cap from that show. She does have nude scenes in at least 3 movies. Olivia Pigeot has a pretty solid resume without really breaking out and also has nude scenes in 3 movies with Powderburn being her nude debut. Nic Bishop has appeared in a number of US TV series and continues to work regularly. Ian Bliss and Alan Lovell have had solid careers as character actors although Lovell's career seems to petered out recently.


Close Contact is a 1999 telemovie where Amanda Douge plays a young lawyer whose lover boss is murdered and millions of dollar is missing from a trust account of a jailed criminal boss which his trophy wife (Kimberley Davies) wants. After attempts to kill her fail, the young lawyer's ex-husband hires a bodyguard (Grant Bowler) who reluctantly takes the job as he needs the money. But the young lawyer is stubborn and she looks for the money and her boss' killer while the bodyguard tags along warning her to not do what she is doing. But she's a strong, in dependant woman so she sends him off to mind the trophy wife who the killer is also after and the wayward teenage daughter (Abbie Cornish) of a furniture salesman for some reason. Typical Screentime crime telemovie but this one is more disposable than usual and I remember that this was dumped on a Friday night in the days before AFL dominated Friday nights, not exactly prime time for telemovies. The plot is ridiculous, Douge is clearly playing a character 10+ years older than her but does OK and the bodyguard gets dumped regularly to unrelated B-plot which strangely becomes the A-plot for about twenty minutes where we find out that Abbie Cornish is playing a schoolgirl stripper. Mostly forgettable but it does have the requisites unnecessary nude scene that Screentime productions always had, this time in the first minute from Amanda Douge. Also good to see that Douge is back acting in Britain after not having a credit for over a decade.

As you see, both are from VHS recordings off the TV, so the quality is even lesser than if they were originals. Powderburn probably comes up the best although I had to encode the sound to mono because it wasn't clear otherwise. Close Contact is OK quality but being a TV movie, it has long disappeared and this copy I had was better than another I found from a local recording which was tracking very badly.