Film Review: Swinging Safari

Reuniting with some of his The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert mates, including producer Al Clark and costume designer Lizzy Gardiner, writer/director Stephan Elliot somehow also managed to gather together six of the biggest stars in the country, dress them up in hideous fashions and make them behave in the tackiest ways possible. The result is sometimes amusing, sometimes outrageous and frequently exhausting.

An adult narrator (Richard Roxburgh) remembers his life in the fictional coastal town of Wallaroo (not the South Australian Wallaroo), and we watch as his 14 year old self, Jeff Marsh (Atticus Robb), back in 1975 or so makes Super 8 movies full of homemade special effects and dangerous stunts, at least one of which proves to be the reason this was originally entitled Flammable Children.

Jeff’s dad Bob (a mutton-chopped Jeremy Sims) is a seller of crappy gadgets for K-Tel and his prim mum Gale (Asher Keddie) is a wannabe society sort who shops, plays tennis and agonises about anyone walking on her plush white carpet with shoes on. In the same cul-de-sac we also find Keith Hall (Guy Pearce looking like a porn star), who works at the now-forgotten job of encyclopedia salesman, and his boozy wife Kaye (Kylie Minogue), To cap it off there’s the pseudo-power-couple Jo Jones (Radha Mitchell), a snobby travel agent, and her husband Rick (Julian McMahon), a big name in selling the sorts of fashionable pills that would be outlawed in the ‘80s.

This chummy sextet spend a lot of time together as their broods of kids run around unsupervised, and soon talk of moving with the times leads to an attempt at staging what the title of the film suggests. Yes, it’s all a bit ugly and all a bit of a disaster.

In the midst of this frenzied activity Jeff is also falling in love with the young but long-suffering Melly (Darcey Wilson), and there’s (in the most fictionalised parts of the plot) much activity on the beach too when a 200 ton dead whale washes up and the sleazy Mayor (Jack Thompson) revels in every chance to use it as a tawdry publicity stunt.

Stuffed to bursting with crude humour and a priceless line or two (“That’s it! I’m moving to Adelaide!”), this once again demonstrates Elliott’s decidedly neutral feelings about the country of his birth, as everything Aussie, Aussie, Aussie is celebrated with feverishly nostalgic glee while, at the same time, also torn to satirical shreds.

Rated M. Swinging Safari is in cinemas now