Stephan Elliot's career is one where it's all been downhill since "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert", or more accurately, a hell of a lot of bumps. In some ways "Priscilla" is lightning in a bottle, a combination of bad taste and strong character arcs, simultaneously shallow and heartfelt, bitchy and sentimental. At the very least, the bad taste is definately back for "Swinging Safari", which could be titled "70s Australian Nostalgia: The movie". Telling the story of three different-classed households in a cul-de-sac and their various interactions, there's a couple of loose threads going through - the filmmaking ambitions of one of the kids, the strained relationships between the parents after a fondue party turns a little suggestive, and the somewhat overly-symbolic whale washed up on the beach.
THe preformances are a little variable, with the bigger names in the parents tending to stick out more - Jeremy Sims as the middle-class dad who's troubled both by his own permissiveness and the permissiveness of his daughter probably scores best, and Kylie Minogue, whose screen career can politely be described as "variable", is somewhat protected by playing an agraphobic who barely talks. It's not so much a comedy that builds as a comedy that comes to a gross-out conclusion (which is to say ... not too different from late seventies early 80s films of the era like "Caddyshack" and "Animal House"). I found it weirdly likeable, even as I can't defend this as great or even particularly good cinema. But then again, I am very specifically a kid of the 70s. So this is very much a "other people's mileage will vary, and a lot of people will hate this" film.
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