The plot centres on Queensland's Gold Coast in the early 1980s, when a disgraced former cop, Michael Stacey writes a book exposing police corruption, does an investigation resulting in 2 murders, exposes a religious cult and watches the army begin a military coup.
Australia
Australia
And I have to warn you that this is Queensland, not California, and I can tell as many lies as I like.
The promise of a political thriller set in the Gold Coast was appealing to me. I’ve been to the Gold Coast once on a trip before. It was a blast being able walk straight from the airport to North Kirra beach, and I enjoyed spending time in Coolangatta, finding it to be a nice relaxing beach town. I can see myself going there again once this whole COVID thing calms down.
The same couldn’t be said for this film’s setting, Surfers Paradise, a blighted hellscape of strip clubs, tacky mini-golf courses, and greasy kebab joints. I was curious…
Truly strange Gold Coast neo-noir, a booze-soaked disgraced cop’s byzantine journey through a world of lost kids and over-indulged tourists, hyper-capital’s fascistic ambitions and a hippie commune’s last grasp at eden before it’s all too late. The jaded voice-over narration leans heavy into the film’s self-consciously hard-boiled poses (“Maybe I had a suicidal streak, one that got worse when sober”), though little of what Stacey stumbles into suggests much of an alternative to his hard-won cynicism. “I’m looking for an eighteen-year-old girl.” “Who isn’t?” “She’s working as a hooker.” “Who isn’t?” The sins of an older generation that gave their children nothing but the world remade as a doomed pleasure dome, the small rebellions of those left paying a bill…
“She was as dangerous as a beach full of blue bottles”.
This is truely a hidden gem find.
The dialogue is sublime, it commentary ahead of its time. A Aussie crime noir that just keeps on giving.
Absolute 💎 GEM 💎
Snappy noir dialogue and sun-drenched desperation is cooler with an Australian accent.
This hard-boiled, red-blooded, sun-baked and rum-soaked vision of an Australian detective noir film set against the backdrop of the shithole city of Surfers Paradise is so endearing and fun just by way of existing.
Any detective movie worth it’s weight in gold can be measured accordingly by it’s protagonist, and Michael Stacy perfectly fits the bill of bringing the archetype of the boozy detective into Australia circa 1982. He couldn’t look less like a “leading man”, his drinking problem couldn’t be less sexy, his clothes don’t fit him, he’s not as debonair as he thinks he is, everyone regards him as a fuck up, and he comes out with ridiculous quotes like “she looked ten years younger after her hysterectomy”.…
This is a valiant attempt to create an Australian Philip Marlowe and putting him against the background of political and police corruption in Queensland in the 1980s was a great idea. Barrett is excellent as our beaten down protagonist, but Bob Ellis’s bursts of unmistakably Bob Ellisian dialogue during the extended Bob Ellis style monologues was just a bit too Bob Ellisy for me.
Australia's answer to Chandler/Marlowe finds Ray Barrett starring as Michael Stacy, disgraced former-cop who has kicked the bottle and begun writing his tell-all exposé novel on police corruption.
The setting is Queensland's Gold Coast in the early 80s, and what begins as a search for the Senator's lost daughter eventually widens to include off-shore oil reserves, attempted military coups, prostitution rings, new age cults, and a banana.
The satirical wit of Goodbye Paradise definitely loses some punch on a North American viewer with a narrow understanding of Australian culture such as myself (one IMDb reviewers says "No doubt, critics at the time, lacked the vision to see the wit and irony of an Australian state seceding from the rest of…
Wonderfully written, the color and tone some of the coolest tropical noir this side of Saint Jack, the mystery satisfying and complex and historical, and the action scenes are some of the worst I’ve ever seen in something of this caliber. It’s a silly conclusion to an otherwise brilliant movie. Altho- the coda does go crazy.
This movie could've been a big hand extending out of the screen to slap me in the face and I'd still appreciate it simply on the basis of it being a detective noir set in Surfers Paradise but the way it skewers Australia's unique brand of grown-boy private school mates politicking and all the bizarre directions it ends up going in were just gravy. John Seale's cinematography makes the Gold Coast's skeeviness beautiful, his work on this manages to make even images like a middle aged alcoholic riding in a speedboat and trying not to throw up visually arresting.
I was watching this and getting flashes of Inherent Vice to the point where I was reimagining the film being directed by PTA and swapping out actors for current ones.
Well, this was...really good. It's centered around a down on his luck booze hound ex-police commissioner who is sent on a PI case to find his missing goddaughter and it goes on through there. You follow him through the case in Queensland as he wades through cults, shady political interests, corruption, beautiful women and a long gallery of friends/old colleagues who want him badly hurt or dead for breaking the blue code of silence. Lots of good lines in this and solid acting. The ending may come off as absurd but it doesn't hurt the film. Only real negative is it runs a little long.
