Where did you find this extraordinarily exotic creature?
In 1972, a good 14 years before Paul Hogan's Crocodile Dundee left the Outback to explore the wilds of New York, Aussie comedian Barry Humphries uprooted his comic-strip character Barry McKenzie -- created for Peter Cook's satirical magazine Private Eye -- from his home in Sydney and plunked the yobbo down in London for a lowbrow culture-clash comedy called The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. Aiding Humphries was director Bruce Beresford, who collaborated on the screenplay, and actor Barry Crocker, who took on the title role so he could be freed up to play his signature character, the soon-to-be-Dame Edna Everage, along with two others. What might have been a breezy way to pass 90 minutes turns into a bit of slog when the running time hews closer to two hours, though, and the bulk of it is spent in the company of the prototypical Ugly Australian.
Ignoring the censorship classification at the head of the film (NPA, which stands for "no poofters allowed" and therefore would bar me from watching it), Beresford and Humphries get right down to business with the reading of Barry's father's will, which stipulates that he'll inherit $2,000 if he goes to the UK. The will doesn't specify that he has to be chaperoned by his Aunt Edna, but she insists on going along anyway and the two of them arrive in London after a brief stopover in Hong Kong during the credits. As it is, the first Pommy bastard Barry meets sets the tone for his entire visit since his stash of Foster's is confiscated at customs. From there, he's ripped off by a taxi driver, checked into a fleabag hotel with a disreputable landlord (Spike Milligan), tapped to appear in a commercial for High Camp cigarettes and nearly seduced by his costar, targeted by predatory Tories who mistake him for a millionaire and try to marry him off to their homely daughter, exploited by a band of faux hippies (one of which is played by Humphries), placed in the care of a loony psychiatrist (Humphries again), pursued by a copper who thinks he's a poof, and picked by a TV director (played by Cook) to appear on a live chat show about Aussies in London that descends into utter chaos, leaving Barry with nowhere to go but home. Before he does, though, he demolishes countless cans of lager with his rowdy mates, rattles off countless euphemisms for taking a piss, completely fails to lose his virginity, and proves just how dim he by not recognizing that one of his old playmates is a lesbian and has taken him to a drag bar. Unlike the equivalent scene in Crocodile Dundee, though, the queens aren't the butt of the joke, making this the only area where The Adventures of Barry McKenzie is the least bit progressive.