Who Departed?
The problem with deliberately sitting down to watch a bad movie is that it’s never as funny as you think it’s going to be. The idea of sitting through, say, Battlefield Earth, is much funnier than actually doing it. Around the twenty-minute mark, it just gets depressing, and by the time the end credits roll, you’re already listing the more enjoyable things you could have been doing for the last two hours. Like pounding nails into your forehead with your bare hands.
But don’t despair. There is still a way you can enjoy bad movie fun and not feel like you’ve wasted an entire evening; simply watch ten minutes of your selected feature per night, preferably as a palate-cleansing prelude to something that’s actually good. Using the Ten Minutes Per Night method, I have waded my way pleasantly through such fascinating debacles as The Nutty Nut, Town & Country, Myra Breckinridge, Two Moon Junction, Psych-Out, The Real Thing (the Australian one with Kate Fischer as a blind sculptress) and The Brown Bunny, although the latter was a real test of the technique, with each ten-minute block feeling like a full hour and a half (no, even the ending wasn’t worth it and, in case you haven’t heard, it’s a prosthetic dick). Of all the movies I have sliced up this way, stretching each across a fortnight, the one that the person who has endured them with me (she has, understandably, requested I keep her name out of this) names as the worst is 1987’s Beyond Therapy. And while it is the work of one of my cinematic heroes, Robert Altman (yes, worse even than O.C. & Stiggs and Quintet), and even though it features Christopher Guest doing an early version of Corky St Clair, I have to agree that Beyond Therapy has been the hardest one to sit through.
Until now.
For some reason, the Australian comedy Those Dear Departed, also from 1987, has just recently been excreted on DVD; hundreds of newly stamped copies can be found spilling from the bargain bins at Sanity and the Virgin Megastore. And even though I nabbed mine for just six bucks, I want my money back.
Accurately described in Scott Murray’s indispensable Australian Film 1978-1992 as ‘a loud and annoying farce’ (you know it’s bad when Murray says it could have been better executed by the director of Hudson Hawk), Those Dear Departed inexplicably features in the credits some of Australian comedy’s biggest names. The men behind perhaps my two favourite comedy characters of all time, Norman Gunston and Fred Dagg, play major roles, and the director is AFI Lifetime Achievement Award winner Ted Robinson, who executive produced, among other things, The Late Show (admittedly an awkward fit, as I’m sure he’d be the first to agree). Further down the credits, the subject of surely Australia’s funniest celebrity arrest, Todd McKenney, appears as ‘assistant choreographer’. I hope for his sake that this wasn’t mentioned during his court proceedings.
I’m assuming the blame for Departed must lie with its screenwriter, Steve J. Spears. Spears, who died in 2007, was an Australian playwright who authored everything from the classic one-man play The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin to the classic Hey Dad…! episode ‘With Love From Nudge’. I have seen neither, although I do recall The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin causing quite a stir when it came to my town in New Zealand in the late seventies. ‘The Redmans from across the road went to the theatre last night,’ my mother announced one morning. ‘No sooner had they sat down when a naked man stepped out on stage. They thought it was a streaker, but apparently it was the whole show.’
Those Dear Departed bills itself as a supernatural black comedy and advertises itself with the poster line ‘There is no rest for the eternally…sexed!!!’. In fact, it is a festival of face-pulling the likes of which have not been seen since the silent era. Even the late Lon Chaney would surely have described Garry McDonald’s relentless gurning in the lead role as ‘a bit much’. McDonald plays Max Falcon, Australia’s greatest actor and a man so famous that he has appeared on the cover of Time magazine, although from the glimpses of his work we are afforded he would be lucky to score a walk-on at Witches in Britches.
In fact, that’s what this film most resembles: a theatre-restaurant show staged on a (comparatively) massive scale. Every character is painted in the broadest possible strokes: for example, the cigar-chomping film producer with the traditional unconvincing American accent, who says of Max Falcon, ‘This boy is Olivier! This boy is Chuck! [do they mean Heston?] This boy is gonna be the King of Hollywood!’. Later we see Falcon perform an excerpt from Richard III in a set of false teeth that dwarf those worn by Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor.
Back in the eighties, the theory went that anything could be made hilarious simply by appending the words ‘The Musical’ to it. Departed’s director, Robinson, and songwriter, Phillip Scott, were major proponents of this trope, wheeling it out time and time again on such shows as The Gillies Report and The Dingo Principle. ‘Maralinga: The Musical’, ‘The Dismissal: The Musical’, ‘Incentivation: The Musical’ and so on. So when we first meet Max Falcon, he is, naturally, starring in something called ‘Freud: The Musical’. ‘Springtime For Hitler’ is, of course, the granddaddy of a form that reached its zenith in The Tall Guy, a movie released with unfortunate proximity to Departed and that features a still piss-funny musical version of The Elephant Man called ‘Elephant!’ That exclamation mark alone is funnier than anything in ‘Freud: The Musical’, which seems to think that constantly mentioning Oedipus Rex is somehow hysterical. ‘We love you and adore you for giving us Oedipus Rex’ sings the cast of ‘Freud’ over and over, adding ‘…of Rhine!!!’ as though that were a punchline. The set features some rather half-hearted giant penises (seemingly aware that they have been upstaged years earlier by the ones in Ken Russell’s Lisztomania), one of which plummets to the stage, nearly braining Max Falcon as he tortuously wends his way towards another word that rhymes with Oedipus. This is the first of many attempts to kill Falcon that have been engineered by his wife, played by Not the Nine O’Clock News star Pamela Stephenson in a performance so bad that she never acted again.
Among those enmeshed in her evil plan are Su Cruickshank, Ignatius Jones and everyone from The Dingo Principle. Alvin Purple himself, Graeme Blundell, features prominently in the credits but appears in only three shots, totalling less than twenty seconds. He got off lightly, unlike poor John Clarke, who tries desperately to swim against the prevailing ham and is pushed of a cliff for his trouble.
After several further murder attempts (does it get any funnier than ground glass in someone’s food?), Falcon is finally offed and ends up in what I thought must have been Hell, due to the number of jugglers, but turns out to be Limbo (the stage of Sydney’s Capitol Theatre), where he will remain until he has avenged himself. This he does by turning into a ghost, courtesy of some bargain basement optical effects that attempt to emulate Ghostbusters but look more like the kind of Day-Glo squiggles found in a mid-eighties Machinations video. None of the ‘ghost logic’ in Those Dear Departed makes any sense. In one scene, a ghost flies through the air and strangles someone, but in another a whole group of them are powerless to stop Pamela Stephenson from walking across a room.
Or the audience from leaving the cinema! Those Dear Departed is so excruciating that even in ten-minute chunks I found my mind constantly drifting off to such questions as ‘Did Su Cruickshank ever think of doing a comedy festival show called The Cruickshank Redemption?’
Nonetheless, Departed is responsible for two of my favourite trivia facts concerning any movie. Firstly, when it was eventually released on video in the US, it was retitled Ghosts CAN Do It. Insanely, this is a reference to the disastrous Bo and John Derek movie Ghosts Can’t Do It. Who the hell thought that this was a good idea? Isn’t it like calling your science fiction movie Battlefield Earth 2?
And, secondly, I can distinctly recall when Those Dear Departed opened in Melbourne on 13 August 1987, for what proved to be a five-day run. It is the only instance I know of where the newspaper ad said, on the opening day, ‘Hurry last days!’
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). Most recently, he directed new episodes of ‘The Librarians’, which returns to ABC1 on October 13.
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