Dorothy (Joy Dunstan) is at the local town hall watching a band perform, but the turnout has not been very substantial and the hall is almost empty. She chats to her friend Jane (Paula Maxwell) about how she'd like to escape this dead end town where she lives with her aunt and uncle on their pig farm, and begins to wonder if the band, Wally and the Falcons, might be her ticket out of there. Once the gig is over, Dorothy gets talking to the lead singer (Graham Matters) and he agrees to take her and Jane along with them in their van, but once on the road, there's an accident and she is knocked out and when she wakes up...
She's in an unauthorised Australian remake of the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz! Well, what do you know? As tributes to that enduring Judy Garland favourite go, this has to be one of the most obscure, but for fans there is quite some novelty in seeing the plot of the original adapted for a very Antipodean take on the whole thing as it sticks surprisingly closely considering its low budget, if barely fantastical. There is even a musical element too, although the cast don't break out into production numbers and follow the Yellow Brick Road while trilling, as the songs are relegated to being played on the soundtrack while the action continues on the screen.
Those songs led this to be subtitled "A Rock 'n' Roll Road Movie", and it does feature a concert near the end, but in the main there's a curiously muted air about it. When Dorothy wakes up she's in the Land of Oz, but then, that's where she was anyway if you see what I mean, and after strolling barefoot through a field she ends up at a boutique run by the Good Fairy, who in a revisionist angle is a camp man (Robin Ramsay) who turns out to have connections to the record industry. This is just what Dorothy wants to hear, as she wants to meet the Wizard, a rock star who she thinks will solve all her problems, so after picking up a pair of ruby high heels (just the thing for hitchhiking in - erm) she heads off for the unnamed city.
On the way she meets three blokes who help, and at times hinder her on the road. First up is Aussie movie stalwart Bruce Spence as the dimwitted but placid Scarecrow, now a surfer, next is a mechanic (our heartless Tin Man - Michael Carman), then a biker pulls up at the garage they've stopped at (our Cowardly Lion, Garry Waddell). These three are pretty well portrayed, and certainly live up to their supposed character defects better than those in the original movie which renders their transformation a little more believable. Yet with every scene presented with the same level of low-key quirkiness, you begin to wonder if there's anything more to this than spotting the references to the earlier incarnation.
What of the Wicked Witch, you ask? She's there, too, although like the Good Witch she's played by a man, a big, burly, moustachioed man at that (Ned Kelly) who tracks Dorothy across the countryside until he manages to kidnap her outside the rock concert. Cue the three new companions to the rescue, although that concert looks like a Ziggy Stardust-inspired affair where the Wizard wears naught but a shoulder pads, silver knee-high boots and a red g-string that constantly threatens to reveal a bit too much - maybe Dorothy could have been saved from the sight of that, too. All is really missing is a Toto, but you should be nodding with recognition throughout if you're familiar with the original. The message that there's no place like home has been replaced with something far more cynical, though what do you expect from a tribute containing the bastardised line "We're off to see the fackin' Wizard!"?
