Director Bruce Beresford
Starring Barry Crocker, Barry Humphries, Spike Milligan
Rated M
Score 5/6

Young Australian, Barry McKenzie, travels to England with his Aunt Edna after his father dies and a request is revealed in his will.

Barry McKenzie was originally a character created by Barry Humphries for a cartoon strip in Private Eye. It should also be noted that The Adventures of Barry McKenzie was the first Australian film to surpass one million dollars in Australian box office receipts.

Until recently I never really was that motivated to check out that much of Barry Humphries early work, so one thing that took a little while to get used was seeing Edna Everage’s hair, I’m more used to seeing her with purple hair. The Adventures of Barry McKenzie is a very watchable movie though its sense of humour is politically incorrect by today’s standards, though still very hilarious. It seems that at least for a time in the 70’s with the cultural divide Australians might have seemed like an entirely different species to the rest of the world and I would have to say the scene in the hospital with the psychiatrist Dr DeLamphrey and perhaps even the scenes with the folk singers (you have to love Mckenzie’s folk songs, they have a certain catchiness) prove it.
One of the more cringeworthy scenes involved the Gort family specifically the character Sarah (portrayed by Jenny Tomasin) as I wondered how young the character was supposed to be. The way Sarah was treated by her scheming mother and how she explained sex to Sarah at the time my first thoughts were very young. For the those of you who might be interested at the time Tomasin was only 3 years younger than Barry Crocker.