Published 2016 on Down Under Flix
Director: Stephan Elliott
Director: Stephan Elliott
Stars: Johnathon Schaech, Rod Taylor, Susie Porter, Dee Smart
Where
to begin?
I’ve
spent a good chunk of the past few weeks pondering that question,
wondering what film to launch this website with.
Obviously,
given the site’s focus on films that flew under the radar or fell through the
cracks, it couldn’t be one of the 41 films to win Best Picture at Australia’s version
of the Oscars, the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (formerly
Australian Film Institute) awards. Nor could it be on this list of the 100 highest earning Australian films. That’s not to say films on either list won’t crop up
eventually – commercial or award success aren’t always guarantors of cultural
longevity – but simply that they won’t be cropping up yet.
No,
the first film spotlighted had to firmly reflect Down Under Flix’s mission statement: a film that had slipped
from or never hit the cultural consciousness, that had fallen into neglect
and needed some attention. Something to set the tone, both for the site and
myself. And, of course, I wanted to start with a bang. Welcome
to Woop Woop ticked
all those boxes, especially the “start with a bang” part. In fact, if there was
ever an explosion in an Australian souvenir shop, the town of Woop Woop would
be created from the scattered debris.
Director
Stephan Elliott’s previous film, The
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, is an iconic piece of
Australian cinema. It’s one of the great popular, popcorn entertainments of the
1990s, alongside Strictly
Ballroom, Muriel’s
Wedding, Babe,
and The Castle,
and it’s certainly the most daring of that pack. Of Elliott’s follow-up films,
the only one I’d seen prior to now was Eye
of the Beholder, a cool little gem of a thriller starring Ewan
McGregor and Ashley Judd. I’m yet to watch more recent fare like Easy Virtue and A Few Best Men, but I’m glad to
have finally caught up with Welcome
to Woop Woop.
Released
in 1997, Welcome to Woop
Woop centres on the terminally unlucky Teddy (Johnathon
Schaech), an American who flees to Australia following an incident abroad.
There he meets and beds the adorable Angie (Susie Porter), who drugs and
transports him to the outback town of Woop Woop. The town’s off the map, hidden
from the rest of the world, and populated by a collection of misfits lorded
over by town elder (and Angie’s father) Daddy-O (Rod Taylor). Think M. Night
Shyamalan’s The Village, but as a broad comedy
where everyone happens to be in on the secret. Teddy’s mind instantly turns to
escape…
Broad “ocker”
comedies aren’t really that prevalent these days, outside of movies and
shows like Fat Pizza and Housos. But it was the default
setting for most Australian comedies in the 1990s, as films like Muriel’s Wedding and The Castle and Elliott’s
own Priscilla attest,
and Elliott lays it on really, really thick
in Welcome to Woop Woop.
I suspect this was one of the straws that broke the genre’s back – the film
cost 10 million dollars and only made half a million in theatres – but the
broad ocker stuff actually serves a deeper thematic purpose here. The film
presents the town of Woop Woop as backwards and anachronistic, and depicts that
particular brand of national identity – that boisterous, coarse larrikinism –
as something that’s toxic, obnoxious, even insidious. It is, Elliott seems
to be suggesting, something to be both indulged and celebrated but also
reviled, and the film does both these things. Viewers with a bad case of
cultural cringe will do some heavy cringing, but that’s very much intended.
Of
course, there’s a long tradition of films and literary works about Americans or
Europeans coming to Australia and being put through the ringer, from classic
canonical works like Marcus Clarke’s For
the Term of His Natural Life and D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo to flicks
like Wake in Fright, Roadgames, Razorback and The Proposition. Welcome to Woop Woop provides yet
another variation on that formula, though American actor Johnathon
Schaech – fresh off the Tom Hanks-directed That Thing You Do!– is no Stacey Keach or Ray
Winstone. He’s fine though, and his beta leading man status provides a nice counterpoint
to the more animated locals of Woop Woop. Elsewhere in the cast, Susie Porter
does great work, milking some pathos from a very deliberate caricature, and Rod
Taylor is likewise great, making me wish we’d seen a bit more of him in local
fare over the years.
Welcome to
Woop Woop is grating at times, but very deliberately so.
If your tastes don’t go for the broad ocker fare, it’s a hard watch, but
that cultural cringe is also a big part of the film’s overall message.
It’s smarter than it looks.
Ben Kooyman