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Comedic crimes: You Can't Stop the Murders (2003) and Ned (2003)

As the self-loathing streak (rightfully or otherwise) in Australian cinema has grown in recent decades, the place at the table for the daggy, overlit, low-budget theatrically-released Australian comedies pervasive in the 1990s and early 2000s (apex: The Castle, d-pex: The Wannabes) has shrunk. Its descendants in more recent years are either much more polished (A Few Best Men, Swinging Safari, Top End Wedding), micro-budget (Hot Mess), or crass and obnoxious (Paul Fenech’s work). 

 

You Can’t Stop the Murders (2003), directed by Anthony Mir, is a product of the genre’s twilight years, in which two cops in a sleepy small town (Gary Eck, Akmal Saleh) are teamed with a city slicker supercop (Mir) to investigate the Village People-themed killings of a biker (Jason Clarke), a construction worker (Gary Sweet), and so on [1]. Whilst the plot is akin to a three-minute sketch—see, for example, Hale & Pace's Spice Killer sketch—the film sustains its one-joke premise fairly well for 95 minutes, with an ensemble of colourfully-sketched minor characters and a functional emotional arc for Eck’s protagonist. The fact no actual Village People songs are included in the film—no doubt an economic concession, but a surprising one given (a) the film was distributed by Miramax and (b) the group aren’t above leaning into self-parody—perhaps saves it from tilting entirely into cute schtick. 

 

Abe Forsythe’s Ned (2003) is another daggy, overlit, low-budget theatrically-released Australian comedy of 2003. A comedic take on the Ned Kelly story/legend/industry, Ned sees its titular hero (Forsythe) reject life on his father’s rubber farm to pursue a career in magic; to finance his illusionist aspirations, he becomes an outlaw. Like Bob Weis’s comedic Wills & Burke, released one week before Graeme Clifford’s serious Burke & Wills, Ned was released in the same year as a major, handsomely mounted, starry-cast, sombre film on the same subject, Gregor Jordan’s Ned Kelly. Forsythe’s parody was released two months after Jordan’s, giving his film a parasitic veneer. 

Forsythe's later, tonally crafty Down Under showed him to be an adroit filmmaker. Such evidence is thinner in Ned—among Kelly comedies, Yahoo Serious’ Reckless Kelly is a better investment—and I didn't find Ned nor You Can Stop the Murders especially funny. Having said that, I was charmed by both films’ scrappy DIY execution and their game casts come to play, including Felix Williamson, Damon Herriman, and Jeremy Sims in the former and Bob Franklin, Jimeoin, and a slew of comedians in the latter. It’s probably best for the nation’s filmic repute that there aren’t half a dozen daggy, overlit, low-budget theatrically-released Australian comedies each year, but they’re certainly easier pills to swallow than objectively better titles like, say, Sweet Country or The Nightingale. 

 

Ben

 

 

[1] Australia’s affection for ABBA is well-documented, reaching its pop cultural apotheosis with the 1994 theatrical releases of The Adventures of Priscilla and, especially, Muriel’s Wedding. The Village People were also disproportionately popular in Australia, with their movie musical Can’t Stop the Music a hit locally but nowhere else.

 


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