Just thought I'd tempt you with a recent Grauniad retrospect on Bazza -
The Adventures of Barry McKenzie rewatched – crude but charming
Not even Sacha Baron Cohen’s offensiveness can compete with the film Bruce Beresford called a ‘colossal mistake’
... The Adventures of Barry McKenzie has an ignominious legacy as a popular comedy more vulgar and offensive than virtually anything that came before or after it. It out-Borats Borat a hundred fold, and even makes episodes of Family Guy look as risqué as sneezes around a dinner table.
If that sounds like an exaggeration, look no further than the first frame. Before the film begins a mock classification insert appears with the words “no poofters allowed”. What kind of comedy these days could get away with that? Which would even try?
The jokes in The Adventures of Barry McKenzie are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and guilty of virtually any other derogatory stereotyping you care to name. Bazza’s zingers include “When it comes to fleecing you, the Poms have got the edge on the Gypos”; “hungry Arab, would have dropped the bastard if he wasn’t qualified for the pension,” and “I’m that thirsty I could drink out of a Japanese wrestler’s jockstrap.”
Some scenes overstay their welcome but splotches of excellence exist among the beer stains. When Dame Edna, for example, sits down to talk to a man played by woman, things get almost meta in their weirdness: a middle-aged woman pretending to be a middle-aged man talking to a middle-aged man pretending to be a middle-aged woman.
... Perhaps Beresford, one of the great Australian filmmakers, ought to take more pride in it. The Adventures of Barry McKenzie is low-as-they-come art, with patchy pacing and hysterical performances, but it’s also a fearless parody of parochial Australians, told with an intoxicating (and sometimes nauseating) old school charm.
The Adventures of Barry McKenzie rewatched ? crude but charming | Film | The Guardian
Interpreting Bazza speak
For the uninitiated, here's a sample of some of the movie's colourful colloquialisms:
Splash the boots, strain the potatoes, water the horses, go where the big knobs hang out, shake hands with the wife's best friend, drain the dragon, siphon the python, ring the rattlesnake, unbutton the mutton, point Percy at the porcelain, shake hands with the unemployed: take a leak
Chunder, big spit, technicolour yawn, yodelling, laugh at the ground: vomit
As dry as a dead dingo's donger: in desperate need of a beer
One-eyed trouser snake, mutton dagger: penis
Bang like a dunny door, go off like an alarm clock: promiscuous female
Spear the bearded clam, knee-trembler, get dirty water off your chest: have sex
Beresford reflects on his 'colossal mistake' | Movie News | SBS Movies
Oh, and it was the first Australian movie to take more than $1 million at the domestic box office.
Another aussie lowbrow classic, for the seriously dedicated -
Alvin Purple rewatched – the raunchy heart of 1970s Ozploitation films
This racy comedy doubles as a commentary on giving the public what they want and rubbing it in prudes’ faces
Alvin Purple: a spicy commentary on the censorship debate. As Ozploitation films of the 1970s exploded with horror, action and violence, the movement also revelled in raunchiness. Relishing new-found artistic freedom, button-pushing directors soiled cinematic bed sheets time and time again during a sustained period of smuttiness unparalleled in Australian film history.
Movies such as The Naked Bunyip, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, Number 96, The True Story of Eskimo Nell, Australia After Dark, Scobie Malone and Felicity presented all sorts of wobbly bits and sexual shenanigans. Average guy antihero Alvin Purple (Graeme Blundell) was at the heart of it, the floppy-haired centre round which all manner of carnal pleasures and perversities orbited.
Directed by Tim Burstall, the 1973 film that assumes his name was a big hit – so big it became the most successful Australian feature ever released at the time, chalking up over $4m at the local box office.
Burstall and writer Alan Hopgood exploited changes to Australian censorship laws made in 1971 by then federal minister for customs, Don Chipp, who introduced an R rating to reduce the number of films that were banned. This led to an influx of cheap imported sex movies and paved the way for Alvin Purple, a film with progressive instincts that were both informed and complicated by the emergence of feminism as a political movement.
It begins with Alvin sitting on a tram contemplating sexual temptation. “How can you keep your mind off it when it’s being flung at you every moment of the day,” he whinges via voiceover, observing an attractive woman with a T-shirt declaring: “Women should be obscene not heard.”
At home by himself, Alvin cracks open a beer and takes drastic measures; he declares celibacy and makes a toast to “the sexless 70s”. A moment later a pretty young neighbour appears at his front door asking for a cup of sugar. Thus begins a differently oriented decade: the sex-filled 70s, where Alvin can’t escape erotic encounters no matter how hard he tries.
In fact the harder he tries, the more situations he finds himself part of. The film’s central joke revolves around the idea that an everyday man, hardly a pin-up model, can be irresistible to women everywhere. More than that, Burstall reconfigures stereotypical gender roles, painting Alvin as a victim and women as sexual predators.
Sex is flung at him virtually every moment of the day, if not in actual encounters than through innuendo. “There are openings everywhere for the right man,” says Alvin’s father during his 21st birthday speech. “Find out what you want to do and then extend yourself.”
Burstall and Hopwood string together episodic situations such as Alvin escaping girls at school (he ends up sleeping with his teacher’s wife) and Alvin taking a job as a water mattress salesman (subsequent scenes practically write themselves).
After Alvin is recruited by a quack from a shonky psychiatrist’s office to be a kind of therapeutic sex worker, helping clients (mostly wives) conquer sexual fears and inhibitions, the practice is busted and the protagonist is put on trial to determine what – if anything – he is guilty of.
These courtroom scenes give Alvin Purple an intellectual anchor and solidify it as something more than a series of disconnected escapades. Alvin’s sort-of pimped services can be read as an equivalent for the movie, a bizarre anthem to giving the public what they want and rubbing it in the face of prudes who stand in the way.
“This trial has been one of the most enjoyable experiences in all of my 30 years on the bench,” the judge – having been treated to a range of racy films starring Alvin – declares prior to ruling. “Speaking as a judge, I found it a welcomed relief to the usual parade of wife beaters, drunks and tax evaders, whose antics I find of no entertainment value whatsoever.”
Those lines are key to the film’s legacy not as a raunchy comedy but as a spicy commentary on the censorship debate. Given the attitudes of today’s censors, who generally regard sexual representations with more suspicion and harsher classifications than violence, Alvin Purple won’t be going out of date any time soon.
Alvin Purple rewatched ? the raunchy centre of the 70s Ozploitation craze | Luke Buckmaster | Film | The Guardian