Welcome to Woop, Woop

A bizarre combination of The Sound of Music and the Mad Max movies, Welcome to Woop, Woop is a gaudy, flamboyant Australian film directed by Stephen Elliot in 1998. Woop, Woop is a gimcrack, claptrap, ramshackle outback outpost inhabited by eccentric, heavy-drinking desert rats.  The village occupies the interior of a sunburnt crater, something like a collapsed salt dome, in the middle of nowhere.  The inhabitants are half-feral -- they work slaughtering kangaroos and packing their meat into cans of "Roof, Roof" dog food.  Rod Taylor, in a state of severe alcoholic desuetude, play Daddy-O, the brutish leader of the commune.  (Taylor's formerly thuggish good looks have slid into shocking disrepair and, at first, I couldn't identify him with the fat, slovenly butcher who controls Woop, Woop with his fists and riflemen -- when someone tries to escape the village by scaling one of its crater walls, he has the refugee shot and tossed into the kangaroo-grinder's hopper.)  The hapless women and children stranded in the hamlet spend their nights at an open air theater watching classic Hollywood musicals and the film's soundtrack is lush with tunes from Guys and Dames, South Pacific, and most notably The Sound of Music.  (The hymn-like "Climb every Mountain" underscores some of the movie's more spectacular action scenes.)

One of the world's archetypal narratives can be characterized in five words:  "A stranger comes to town."  In the case of this film, an American involved in smuggling cockatiels gets involved in a farcical, if bloody, confrontation with gangsters and has to flee to Australia.  There, he is seduced by a coarse, sexually voracious, Australian girl from the outback -- she refers to sexual intercourse, as "parting my beef curtains."  The girl kidnaps the hero, who finds himself a resident of Woop, Woop; he seems to have been brought to the remote village for vaguely eugenic reasons -- the denizens of the town have been interbreeding and their bloodlines have become decadent.  The insatiable blonde girl is the daughter of Rod Taylor's Daddy-O.  After some acquaintance with the anthropological features of Woop, Woop (for instance, "Dog Day", a day of the week when everyone blazes away with their guns at the local dogs), the hero decides to flee the town -- a capitol offense under Daddy-O's laws.  Allying himself with a woman whose husband was shot dead when he attempted to flee, the hero contrives a plan to escape.  The escape plot climaxes during the Viking funeral of Daddy-O's wife, the hero and his girl fleeing over the rim of the crater while the dead woman is burned on a huge funeral pyre to the accompaniment of various Broadway show-tunes.  The lovers decamp aboard a vast mining truck with house-high wheels and there is a frenzied escape, incongruously set to melodies from The Sound of Music, an action sequenc that parodies the various car and muscle-car chases in the Mad Max movies.  Everything is hysterically exaggerated, the Whop, Woop residents extravagantly filthy and mangy, and the climactic vehicular mayhem involves a confrontation with a mythical being, a giant 'Roo who appears in the desert wasteland to take revenge of Daddy-O for the slaughter of his kind.  The film is engaging, generally quite funny, and has a weird sort of Wagnerian grandeur -- the tone fluctuates wildly between poignant love scenes and sinister post-Apocalyptic violence, all of this scored to the themes from assorted Hollywood musicals of the fifties and sixties.  Stephen Eliot, who made the camp spectacle, The Adventures of Priscilla, the Queen of the Desert, (1993)about a transvestite crossing the outback, has a lurid, baroque sensibility -- he's like his fellow Australian, Baz Luhrman, mad with the imagery of classical Broadway and Hollywood musicals.  My sense is that Elliot would be most comfortable simply directing a standard Hollywood musical and the defect in Welcome to Woop, Woop is simply that the film can't ever become what it aspires to be:  that is, an expensively produced song-and-dance musical like The Sound of Music or Cabaret.