Film Review: Housos vs Authority

Housos vs Authority. Rated MA 15+ (frequent strong coarse language, sex scenes and drug use). 103 minutes. Written and directed by Paul Fenech.

Verdict: Fenech’s housos very quickly wear out their welcome in this long, repetitive big screen adaptation.

The history of Australian cinema is littered with films that celebrate anarchic, irreverent, broad-based humour – almost to the point that it sometimes seems that for every Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) there’s a The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972). Equally, Australian characters from the lower end of the country’s socio-economic spectrum have been the subject of many satirical films and television series from Kath and Kim to Fenech’s controversial television series Housos that premiered on SBS in late 2011.

In this feature film adaptation of his television series, Fenech’s (Pizza, Swift and Shift Couriers, Fat Pizza) residents of the fictitious Sunnyvale public housing estate are on a quest to make sure Shazza (Elle Dawe) is able to make the trip to Alice Springs to visit her dying mum. Along the way, cops (and just about everybody else) get ‘thonged’ (slapped about with a thong), and every form of authority is ridiculed, provoked and, ultimately, triumphed over.

While it is undeniable that Fenech (who also plays the lead houso ‘Dazza’) brings his characters to life with a considerable amount of affection, his screenplay runs out of puff about two-thirds of the way through and boredom sets in as scenes that were moderately amusing the first time lose most of their appeal by the time we see them re-enacted another three or four times. It’s a peculiar weakness in a film that plays a loud and foul-mouthed line consistently throughout its long running time – and points, rather perversely, to a lack of genuinely creative ideas about how to take the film further toward the pinnacle of anarchic, almost revolutionary bad taste to which it obviously aspires.

By the time our revolutionaries are dragged before a Supreme Court Judge (Barry McKenzie’s Barry Crocker in an irony-laced performance), the tone and the pace have become almost funereal – and not even the mooning of a judge (which might have been funny in 1972) can save it.

Like the recent movie version of Kath and Kim (Kath and Kimderella), Housos vs Authority rapidly loses whatever impact it might have enjoyed in the bite-sized, episodical format of television production which obviously suits it better than the significant demands made of stories for the big screen.

This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspaper Group.