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Death in Brunswick [1991] Despite its offputting title - which vaguely refers to Mrs Fitzgerald's favourite record, the Mahler soundtrack of Death in Venice - Death in Brunswick is a sprightly black comedy, far more successful than the recent Cold Dog Soup in adapting the nightmare tone of After Hours or The Trouble With Harry to a low-rent Australian setting. Sam Neill, stretching himself with a deliriously seedy loser performance, blends in perfectly with a nightmare world created in a succession of truly horrible locations - not only his ravaged tract house, with its piles of newspaper and unwashed crockery and baggy wallpaper and the Club Bombay kitchens, with filthy work surfaces, rotten meat and cockroaches, but also the more presentable but no less ghastly ornament-ridden homes of Mrs Fitzgerald and the Papafagos family - inhabited by threatening and/or pathetic figures who invariably make the situation worse. With a no-less perfectly befuddled performance from John Clarke as Carl's unbelievably loyal mate Dave, this imagines a class of Australian males as fortyish adolescents, bullied either by their mothers or wives who treat them like children, content to wallow in filth and consistently engaging for all their burned-out lifestyles. With a casual bad taste that begins with the expected but nevertheless
relishable joke of Carl serving his tormentors a pizza spiced with mouse
droppings and squashed bugs, this works up a vein of truly sleazy comic
horror that climaxes in the graveyard, as Carl and Dave blunder about
trying to squeeze Mustafa in with a rotten corpse. As in all the best
black comedies, the potentially offensive subject matter is defused
by sympathetic characterisations, with Carl and Dave and Sophie signalling
their merit by not overreacting to awful situations, greeting each appalling
plot turn with a resigned shrug that finally blends in with suburban
catholicism as espoused in the hilarious 'miracle' scene, and which
pays off in a beautifully-timed monologue at the bedside of Carl's stricken
mother, as he repeats the incredible plot of the film, and takes the
blame for everything upto and including turning the nasty old woman
into a vegetable. Remarkably assured in its sustaining of a thinnish
premise for nearly two hours, this marks an especially noteworthy debut
for John Ruane, who comes from the Swinburne Film and Television School
of Melbourne, a stable which - with Ann Turner [Celia],
John Hillcoat [Ghosts of the Civil Dead] and Richard
Lowenstein [Dogs in Space] as other graduates - seems
to be turning out a generation of film-makers unwilling to subscribe
to the deadening good taste that smothered the tactful Australian film
industry of the '80s. First Published In: Monthly Film Bulletin [issue unknown] Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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