Mr Accident
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Yahoo Serious burst upon us in 1988 with his entertaining and very successful Young Einstein. Then five years later came the unfortunate Reckless Kelly. Mr Accident opening this week won’t win him many more fans.

Mr Accident sounds like it could be a character who has an irregular spot on Play School, or certainly as the hero of one of those "Mr...." books. Play School is an Australian children’s television half hour that has been going for decades (it started in 1967). It’s still going, but I had to check the TV guide to make sure. It’s not the sort of program that’s going to hold the average adult’s attention forever.

But Mr Accident has the feel of an expanded hour and a half of Play School, or perhaps an over long session by circus clowns, and it holds a similar amount of appeal for the average audience.

The plot also unfortunately has elements of the dumb Aussie within it, especially with the character of Sunday Valentine (a dopey Dora if ever there was one) and the sort of silly story that would be surrealists like Yahoo Serious might find appealing. If handled well, both of those aspects are fine but the tone and the too frantic pace of Mr Accident makes it difficult to really warm to.

An egg factory is taken over and the new owner as a marketing gimmick is planning to put an addictive drug into the eggs to boost sales. Roger Crumpkin (Serious) is a maintenance man who foils the villain, along the way finding his girl.

There are some nice moments, some of them are very funny, but Mr Accident is in turns overblown and then under written. Yahoo Serious is appealing. I like his fresh faced, innocent, animated look. He’s proved in Young Einstein that his strange, vigourous brand of humour can work, but it seems often that Mr Accident just tries too hard.

This could be because everyone in the film has the same sort of exaggerated, manic mania that has infected Roger Crumpkin. It might have worked to have had perhaps only one or two of the other characters inhabiting the Crumpkin’s surreal stratosphere, allowing them to relate to a comparatively normal straight world.

That might have allowed Serious to explore more deeply both the comic and sad aspects of Roger’s personality. That’s why there’s a fine and strongly based tradition of straight men (and women) in cinema. But this mix didn’t work.

There were some fine touches though. Roger’s avalanche of rubbish down 20 odd floors of apartment buildings was a hoot. Having an egg factory somehow situated in the Sydney Opera House was great fun, as was Roger and Sunday Valentine’s (Helen Dallimore) great views of Sydney Harbour from their impoverished flats. We Wish!

Police Officer Rikki Rogerson’s (not Roger Rogerson’s) big bottom was riveting as were Yahoo’s callisthenics when he was trying to pull the flying saucer hub cap (yes!!) out of the wall of Sydney’s big hole and, that’s right. That was Flacco with him there, mysteriously credited as being Paul Livingstone.

2 Bit Arsed Flys