In 1993, long-running TV soap opera, A Country Practice, was axed by the Seven Network, opposition leader John Hewson gave his infamous “birthday cake” interview and an artist formerly known as Greg Pead released his second hit Australian movie.
Pead, who changed his name to Yahoo Serious in 1980, catapulted to international stardom after the box office bonanza of his 1988 debut Young Einstein. The success of that film, which recast history’s most influential theoretical physicist as a wacky Tasmanian with a thirst for beer and music, sent the Serious career spinning. In 1989 he appeared on the cover of Time magazine and Mad magazine, undertook a whirlwind international PR tour and even had his own prime time series on MTV.
Stakes were high for the rubber-faced comedian’s second film, 1993’s Reckless Kelly, which also imagines what a historical figure might be look like in a contemporary Australian context. It was a smash-hit at the local box office, where it gobbled up around $5.4m (Young Einstein, which was more popular internationally, earned $1.6m).
The film begins in typical Serious style. Which is to say, completely flippantly: the intro is an upside down shot tracking across an expanse of water to the tune of Yothu Yindi’s Djapana. The image flips right way up and crawls on to land to arrive on the doorstep of the Glenrowan Hotel, a ramshackle run-down woody looking place where bar flies loiter and Aussie animals mill about outside. The occupants of a dilapidated red couch on the porch are two kangaroos slouched between a dog, a snoozing wombat and a cockatoo.
The concept is equally outrageous, resting on the idea that the infamous Kelly gang kept going and adapted to the times. They distribute all their stolen earnings to the poor, work in the manufacture (and consumption) of beer and live in a national park.
The Reckless Island set, where a large part of the first act takes place, is wonderful. The hotel has a windmill, a pink video rental sign, beer cans strewn everywhere, a fire fighter’s pole connecting the balcony to the ground and twisted curvy architecture. It looks like a cross between a Hobbit home, a Nickelodeon game show set and the detritus-filled homesteads of Welcome to Woop Woop. Random paraphernalia adorns the walls and inside is a beautifully kitschy combination of pub and video store – complete with a bar on one side and aisles of video tapes on the other.
Trouble in beer-splotched paradise ensues when a maniacal bank owner named Sir John (Hugo Weaving, in hammy villain mode) manages the sale of Reckless Island to Japanese investors. Ned must come up with one million big ones to save the place, while not breaking the cardinal rule that the Kelly gang only gives to the needy.
It’s small guys versus big guys in a battle for real estate, a story arc that often resonates with Australian audiences. Four years after Reckless Kelly, Darryl Kerrigan fought compulsory acquisition in 1997’s The Castle while in 2002, Mick Molloy donned whites to save a bowls club in Crackerjack.
Audiences will no doubt recall Ned’s goofy costume, including inverted metal rubbish bin helmet and knee pads, plus some of Reckless Kelly’s sight gags: Yahoo Serious shooting flies, perhaps, or firing bullets at an ATM machine that reacts by spewing out money. Less likely to be remembered is the film’s progressive social and political commentary. With no other source of income, Ned jets off to LA to become an actor and the film morphs into a satire on Hollywood and its obsession with celebrity.
He is told he will become a household name, laps up the attention and, in one curly moment, is in danger of being shot by police. He says no TV network would stoop so low as to broadcast his demise on air; cue the arrival of an excitable television reporter filing a live broadcast. We learn the police aren’t allowed to shoot actors. As one character puts it: “If the police start shooting actors then the studios close down. If that happens, there’s no more movies.”
At this point Reckless Kelly gets a little meta. Ned decides to act the part of an actor, hooking up with an ambitious director and taking on a role as a flamboyant Christian cowboy in a ludicrous production that aims at nothing more than shallow entertainment(a deflection of his critics, perhaps, or a hat tip to films such as Sullivan’s Travels that contemplate the high/low art divide). This leads to movie-within-the-movie moments in which Serious (with co-writers Lulu Pinkus, David Roach and Warwick Ross) gently mocks the filmmaking process and the industry of celebrity, presumably inspired by his own experiences with sudden fame.
Bizarrely, Reckless Kelly incorporates cynical commentary on gun fetishism in the US – a bold move given Ned’s reliance on his trusty revolver. Serious adds an environmentalist element (Ned aspires to reclaim Reckless Island and “save it from ecological disaster”) and messages around being pro-republic and pro-Indigenous rights (next to his Indigenous uncle, Ned rips the Union Jack off a flag and replaces it with a picture of a kangaroo).
Watched all these years later, Reckless Kelly feels like a film-maker cramming so many things into a shits-and-giggles comedy, making the most of it when he still could.
Pushing aside the possibility of a belated comeback, Serious released a third and final feature film in 2000’s Mr Accident. Around the time of its release he appeared during the opening of the Sydney Olympics, launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the Yahoo! search engine and, like a rare animal slinking back into the wilderness, absconded from public life.
