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#222 - Housos vs. Authority
Paul Fenech, 2012
Focuses on the unruly inhabitants of a housing estate in the worst suburb in Australia as they get into all sorts of misadventures, mainly involving their attempts to get from Sydney to Uluru.
I am really not a fan of Paul Fenech's comedy. Fat Pizza (the big-screen version of his work-com Pizza) cracked the top half of my worst movies ever list due to its obnoxiously unfunny and immature humour. Fenech's follow-up to Pizza was Housos (named after the Australian slang for the people who live in housing estates), a show that pretty much as I described in the logline. I watched the first episode (possibly the second) before giving up on it because it was just as irritating as Pizza had been but the edginess of the humour had escalated without improvement. So, with all this in mind, why would I ever want to watch a feature-length version of a show that I couldn't stand? Well, honestly, it's because Netflix's rating prediction system told me that my probable rating for this movie would be four-and-a-half out of five. I admit that I was intrigued how Netflix would come to that conclusion, and I figured that at the very least it would make for tolerable background noise, so I proceeded to load up the movie.
Well, you know what they say. "Fool me once, shame on you - fool me twice, shame on me." Housos vs. Authority is everything that I feared (and, to be quite honest, expected) it would be. To call this satirical would be generous and not exactly accurate - while the film does (presumably) exaggerate many stereotypes of not just the lower-class Housos themselves but also the police and politicians who stand in opposition to them, it's about as basic as satire can get. From the snobby fashion designers trying to stage a photoshoot in the neighbourhood at the start of the film to the politicians that try to have the main Housos arrested for defacing Uluru (and even a brief, out-of-focus appearance by a Julia Gillard impersonator), the satire is extremely entry-level and, in the latter case, actually makes the supposedly villainous suit-and-tie bureaucrats more sympathetic and understandable than the extremely petty and foolish criminals who are the closest things we have to protagonists in this movie. Of course, I don't require protagonists to be sympathetic to be likeable or even engaging (especially when it comes to comedies), but the Housos are easily some of the most irritating characters ever committed to film and the fact that there are no serious consequences for any of their actions sucks the weight out of the movie's already underweight narrative. Just because these characters are deliberately exaggerated for comic effect doesn't mean they have that comic effect - instead, a lot of them come as shrill-voiced, witless, oversexed and, worst of all, unfunny. Not even the fact that the plot is driven by one of them trying to get to Alice Springs in order to say goodbye to her dying mother is enough to endear me to either her or the others. The gimmick of having the whole thing be narrated through the fourth wall by a minor character who has no actual impact on the plot is also worthless - I got enough of that garbage with Two Hands.
The direction matches the lack of quality behind the writing. The whole thing is sloppily shot and edited in such a way that matches the incoherence and incompetence of the plot and gags. The soundtrack is made up of terrible Australian rap songs, which is only made worse by the fact that several songs get repeatedly frequently - a movie that relies this much of repeating the same awful jokes over and over should not mirror that through the use of leitmotifs. It's also 100 minutes long, which is way too long for such a thin and superficial movie - at least Disaster Movie was short. Housos vs. Authority manages to outdo Fat Pizza in being one of the most downright contemptible excuses for a comedy I've ever seen. It's pretty telling that I saw this a couple of days after the notoriously execrable parody that is Disaster Movie and I'm actually starting to consider this the worse movie. They are both lazily written satires full of unlikeable characters and terrible gross-out humour, but the kicker is that everyone knows Disaster Movie is terrible. Housos has enough fans to guarantee not just multiple seasons (and it's still running) but also this movie and another upcoming movie that crosses over with Fat Pizza. That's the biggest joke of all, but that doesn't make it the funniest.
Paul Fenech, 2012
Focuses on the unruly inhabitants of a housing estate in the worst suburb in Australia as they get into all sorts of misadventures, mainly involving their attempts to get from Sydney to Uluru.
I am really not a fan of Paul Fenech's comedy. Fat Pizza (the big-screen version of his work-com Pizza) cracked the top half of my worst movies ever list due to its obnoxiously unfunny and immature humour. Fenech's follow-up to Pizza was Housos (named after the Australian slang for the people who live in housing estates), a show that pretty much as I described in the logline. I watched the first episode (possibly the second) before giving up on it because it was just as irritating as Pizza had been but the edginess of the humour had escalated without improvement. So, with all this in mind, why would I ever want to watch a feature-length version of a show that I couldn't stand? Well, honestly, it's because Netflix's rating prediction system told me that my probable rating for this movie would be four-and-a-half out of five. I admit that I was intrigued how Netflix would come to that conclusion, and I figured that at the very least it would make for tolerable background noise, so I proceeded to load up the movie.
Well, you know what they say. "Fool me once, shame on you - fool me twice, shame on me." Housos vs. Authority is everything that I feared (and, to be quite honest, expected) it would be. To call this satirical would be generous and not exactly accurate - while the film does (presumably) exaggerate many stereotypes of not just the lower-class Housos themselves but also the police and politicians who stand in opposition to them, it's about as basic as satire can get. From the snobby fashion designers trying to stage a photoshoot in the neighbourhood at the start of the film to the politicians that try to have the main Housos arrested for defacing Uluru (and even a brief, out-of-focus appearance by a Julia Gillard impersonator), the satire is extremely entry-level and, in the latter case, actually makes the supposedly villainous suit-and-tie bureaucrats more sympathetic and understandable than the extremely petty and foolish criminals who are the closest things we have to protagonists in this movie. Of course, I don't require protagonists to be sympathetic to be likeable or even engaging (especially when it comes to comedies), but the Housos are easily some of the most irritating characters ever committed to film and the fact that there are no serious consequences for any of their actions sucks the weight out of the movie's already underweight narrative. Just because these characters are deliberately exaggerated for comic effect doesn't mean they have that comic effect - instead, a lot of them come as shrill-voiced, witless, oversexed and, worst of all, unfunny. Not even the fact that the plot is driven by one of them trying to get to Alice Springs in order to say goodbye to her dying mother is enough to endear me to either her or the others. The gimmick of having the whole thing be narrated through the fourth wall by a minor character who has no actual impact on the plot is also worthless - I got enough of that garbage with Two Hands.
The direction matches the lack of quality behind the writing. The whole thing is sloppily shot and edited in such a way that matches the incoherence and incompetence of the plot and gags. The soundtrack is made up of terrible Australian rap songs, which is only made worse by the fact that several songs get repeatedly frequently - a movie that relies this much of repeating the same awful jokes over and over should not mirror that through the use of leitmotifs. It's also 100 minutes long, which is way too long for such a thin and superficial movie - at least Disaster Movie was short. Housos vs. Authority manages to outdo Fat Pizza in being one of the most downright contemptible excuses for a comedy I've ever seen. It's pretty telling that I saw this a couple of days after the notoriously execrable parody that is Disaster Movie and I'm actually starting to consider this the worse movie. They are both lazily written satires full of unlikeable characters and terrible gross-out humour, but the kicker is that everyone knows Disaster Movie is terrible. Housos has enough fans to guarantee not just multiple seasons (and it's still running) but also this movie and another upcoming movie that crosses over with Fat Pizza. That's the biggest joke of all, but that doesn't make it the funniest.