HAVE you ever seen Barry McKenzie Holds His Own? If the answer is no, rest assured you’re not alone.
There are many reasons why this base-level Aussie comedy from director Bruce Beresford has slipped through the cracks and seems unlikely to make any sort of comeback in the near future.
Firstly, it’s so 1970s it almost hurts. Brash, boorish and laden with lazy sexual slurs and casual racial stereotyping, it’s certainly not a film for anyone who’s either easily offended or requires a respectable standard of plotting, dialogue or characterisation from their movie viewing experience.
Secondly, it’s really a load of old rubbish - but since it bizarrely holds a reputation as something of a rogue comedy classic in some quarters, it still justifies a closer look. That it also contains a rabble-rousing performance from one of Australia’s most beloved comics, and one who has just left us at that, certainly helps as well.
Released in 1974 and starring Barry Crocker as its titular lead character, Barry McKenzie Holds His Own was a follow up to the similarly basic The Adventures Of Barry McKensie. It tells the unlikely tale of how Barry’s beloved Auntie Edna Everage, played by Barry Humphries who passed away earlier this week, gets mistaken for the Queen of England and kidnapped by a crazed Transylvanian vampire, Count Erich Von Plasma, the head of a totalitarian state eager to up their tourist numbers with a little Royal attraction.
It’s left to the bold Barry and his oddball chums to sort things out and rescue Edna, so they swiftly board a flight into darkest Transylvania to do just that.
What develops from that basic storyline is little more than an hour and a half of 'jokes' about bodily fluids, endless references to "Poms” and “shirt-lifters” and more moments of projectile vomiting than you’d find in a month of I’m A Celebrity specials.
Really, the warning signs are there from the title down. A film which sniggeringly calls itself Barry McKenzie Holds His Own is never going to be an intellectual offering, is it? This is a proudly low rent affair on every front, but while it’s an undeniably grubby experience, it remains an intriguing film - and there’s considerable fun to be had spotting familiar British thespian types slumming it for a quick pay day.
Front and centre of this cinematic walk of shame are Dad’s Army stalwart John le Mesurier, who turns up in a spoof TV gameshow sequence trying to win Australian citizenship, and future Halloween star Donald Pleasence, who plays the bloodthirsty Count at the centre of the ridiculous plot with a sheepish demeanour that suggests he wishes the whole thing would just slip away into the dusty corners of cinema history never to be seen again.
No such luck for him, or us!
Barry Crocker is grand and relatively enigmatic as the all-Aussie leading man here, but really this is all about his most famous creation, Dame Edna, meeting Dracula - and as such, it delivers, with Humphries hamming it up shamelessly and ramming home the cheap gags like a man possessed. He can’t save this sorry mess, of course, but he clearly has fun trying.
