Australia. 1987.
Crew
Director – Karl Zwicky, Screenplay – Ken Methold, Producers – Leo Barretto & Ken Methold, Photography – John Stokes, Music – Frank Strangio, Optical Effects – Springett Optical Service. Production Company – Reef Films.
Cast
John Doyle (Mark), Nicola Bartlett (Cheryl Davies), Ray Barrett (Roderick Bael), Nathy Gaffney (Cleo), Pamela Hawksford (Helen), Jacqueline Brennan (Trish), Chris Betts (Alec), Michael Simpson (Frank Haines), Reginald Cameron (Henry), Michael McCaffrey (Psycho), Tracy Nugent (Dero), Deirdree Wallace (Weirdo Woman), Donna Jay Newby (Hitch Hiker)
Plot
The real estate agent Mark is asked by his boss to travel to Crompton for a job. Along the road, Mark sees a woman being attacked and stops to aid her. However, crazies that live in the bush attack and made him a prisoner. He makes an escape and finds his way to a nearby mansion where he is given a welcome by millionaire Roderick Bael and Cleo and Helen, the two girls who live with him. Mark sleeps with both the girls. Bael introduces Mark to his Threefold Plan to make millions on currency exchange markets and involves being ruthless with anyone in his way. Mark returns to his girlfriend Cheryl changed, demanding all their savings to invest with Bael and acting violent with her, while also killing his bosses. Concerned, Cheryl follows Mark as he returns to Bael’s house only to find there is nothing there – just an old ruin.
Contagion – not to be confused with Contagion (2011), the more high-profile pandemic film from Steven Soderbergh – was made during the great era of Ozploitation. This was period between the mid-1970s and late 1980s when Australian Cinema was just starting to find its feet and produced a prodigious output of exploitation films for theatrical and later video release. There was a highly entertaining documentary made charting the phenomenon with Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2008).
Contagion is one of the more obscure entries among the Ozploitation fad – so much so that Not Quite Hollywood in its fairly exhaustive overview of the genre entirely neglects it. The film has a head-scratching plot that leaves you trying to get a handle on what is going on. Not to mention that the very title ‘Contagion’ makes you think that it is going to be a Plague and Pandemic film whereas the opening narration makes it apparent that contagion refers to a sense of moral corruption.
It is a real head scratcher where the film is going. You follow average everyday realtor John Doyle as he sets out to view a house only to stop to aid a woman he sees being attacked on the roadside. Within only a matter of minutes of opening, the film bewilderingly goes from regular drama to what seems like a Backwoods Brutality film where Doyle and the woman hitchhiker (Donna Jay Newby) are made prisoners by a group of people who seem to live out in the open in the roadside brush. Who these people are is something the film never bothers to explain – for that matter, the fate of the hitchhiker is forgotten about immediately after the scene.
Doyle makes an escape and is welcomed by millionaire Ray Barrett and the two girls he lives with (Nathy Gaffney and Pamela Hawksford) where Barrett offers tips on how to become successful on the currency exchange market and Doyle is welcomed into a threeway with the two girls. Barrett also lectures Doyle on his Threefold Plan for success, which involves being ruthless with everything in his way. Doyle returns to the city and becomes violent, nearly pushing girlfriend Nicola Barrett over a balcony and killing a co-worker and his boss (by respectively forcing him to do weightlifting and collapse from a heart-attack and in the second case withholding his asthma inhaler).
By this point, the film seems to be taking so many weird doglegs, you are wondering where it is going. There then comes the twist where Nicola Barrett hires a small plane and improbably manages to locate where John Doyle has travelled to in the bush. We see him standing in the arms of one of the girls but as she flies overhead in a Conceptual Reversal Twist she sees him standing in the ruins of a house on his own holding thin air. It is here that it becomes apparent that we are in the midst of a Ghost Story and that the house in the woods is a ghost house. It works okay, although I cannot say that Contagion comes out as a particularly successful example of the genre – it juts seems too head-scratchingly bizarre to ever engage with.
Karl Zwicky is a director who has mostly worked in Australian television. His other films of genre note are the Paws (1997) about a talking dog, the animated The Magic Pudding (2000) and Sinbad and the Minotaur (2011).
Film available in several parts here