Welcome To Woop Woop

We will twig then that Welcome To Woop Woop is somewhat different.

Barry Humphries apart from Edna Everage, Sir Les Patterson et al. is famous for placing gum boots in an exhibition of surrealist art years ago, filling them with vanilla custard and calling his exhibit Pus In Boots.

Humphries made his career lampooning middle Australia, but anyone pretentious was fair game. So what's he doing in the cast of Welcome To Woop Woop?

Welcome To Woop Woop is about a mob of unemployed formerly hard working Australians who retreat to an old asbestos mine in desert Australia (Woop Woop) and wall themselves off from the contemporary world.

They fly the Eureka Flag, smoke lots of dope, drink heaps of XXXX and are covered in the blood and gore of the kangaroos they kill.

One of them Angie (Susie Potter) abducts an American hustler (Jonathan Schaech) as a husband. Her father Daddy O (Rod Taylor) runs Woop Woop as a despot, with the usual modicum of attendant corruption.

He's not averse to shooting dead anyone who trys to escape his Bali Hai.

Bali Hai? Daddy O is a devotee of his two favourite films South Pacific and the Sound Of Music. He and his charges revel in Rodgers And Hammerstein music and Elliot obviously has relished the opportunity to be able to feature some of his very favourite music in his latest film.

The irony of Julie Andrews singing The Sound Of Music in the desert provides great material for an over the top director like Stephan Elliot.

A magnificent musical score, exuberant acting and an inspired set allow Elliot to establish and maintain a wonderful and bizarre fantasy world in Welcome To Woop Woop.

But if Welcome To Woop Woop is just an exuberant flight of fancy; a vaudevillian Mad Max which makes fun of a mob of ill educated and unfortunate Aussies who live in an Orwellian theme park complete with Hollywood music then it wouldn't be of much value to us as Australians.

But there's more to Welcome To Woop Woop. It's worth noting the sub texts, although Stephan Elliot's interviews would indicate that he would consider anything taken too seriously to be ridiculous.

But still, there's that mad, stoned doctor, the Eureka flag, the hustling American and the asbestos pit!

Both Priscilla: Queen Of The Desert and Welcome To Woop Woop, Elliot's films to date, feature outback, eccentric Aussies and I'd imagine that Stephan Elliot loves outrageous people, wherever they might spring from.

Who could forget the Jackie Howed woman in the bar in Priscilla, let alone the drag queens.

But Elliot couldn't be accused of making fun of his characters, even if he does think them to be ridiculously funny. Unlike Barry Humphries Elliot hasn't become nasty so far anyway. (Don't arrive late at one of Edna Everage's live shows!)

No, the characters in Priscilla and in Welcome To Woop Woop are treated affectionately. Working class Australians are the heroes of Elliot films, even if they work in a drag show.

And it seems overdue for Australiana, and ordinary Australians to reappear prominently in our cinemas at a time when our culture is under such a serious threat from the ravages of globalisation and the attendant unemployment.

The residents of Woop Woop stay stoned and self mployed, living in an industrial, polluted graveyard but happy in spite of it all. They're not so much dumb as desperate.

Perhaps they mirror the way a lot of middle class urban Australians are feeling these days. They've lost their freedom to a despot but at least Daddy O stays in town and (so far) doesn't export their profits overseas.