Welcome to Woop Woop.

There are two Australias, at least to Yanks who never get out of the house. There is the feel-good Australia, that sunny and rugged land where the party never stops. This is the continent of g'day mate and bush walking, of surfing at Bondi and sunning in Queensland, of singing by the billabong and dancing till the Sydney dawn at gay Mardi Gras.

Then there is the dark Australia, haunted by the karma of its criminal history. This is a mean-spirited, nasty place, where every cruel gesture seems suffused with the spite and agony of its long-dead transported prisoners. It is the Oz of Muriel's Wedding and Sweetie, of baby-stealing dingoes and gang-ridden futuristic societies protected by homophobic movie stars from Peekskill, N.Y.

As a reflecting image country, Welcome to Woop Woop is a mirror with both faces. Director Stephan Elliott (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert), takes us to a utopian community somewhere in the nether regions, where decapitated dolls are the going design statement and the classic Broadway show tune "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" is the daily reveille. Like its name, Woop Woop offers the surface lure of frolicsome days and boogie nights. Its soul, by contrast, is a living hell.

At least it is to a young American named Teddy (Johnathon Schaech), a New York City scam artist who takes it on the lam to Sydney and is promptly abducted to Woop Woop by a sex-starved babe named Angie (the wide-eyed Susie Porter, who suggests Betty Hutton on hormone overdrive). There he is shanghaied into marrying her by her father, Daddy-O (an all-but-unrecognizable Rod Taylor, looking craggy and bloated), who is also the town's resident Mussolini. Thanks to Daddy-O's fondness for Rodgers and Hammerstein, the town folk are treated to a nonstop diet of R&H sound tracks blasted from a public-address speaker, POW-camp-style, as they merrily grind kangaroo meat at the local dog-food factory. At night Daddy-O's elves gather under the stars to watch a faded print of The Sound of Music, singing along and answering back the dialogue a la The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Funny, but there isn't a single gay piano bar in sight. Or gay person, for that matter, unless you count a misfit hairdresser (Strictly Ballroom's Paul Mercurio) who suffers an old-timey closeted-movie-homosexual demise. That is because Woop Woop, at base, is a nightmare stand-in for that provincial nest from which urban queers have so often escaped, a rural Alcatraz of kitschy taste, thuggish rituals, and absurdly vacuous cheer where people-of-lavender-color kiss in the shadows. In Woop Woop every day is a bad hair day.

With the snide glee of a confirmed city mouse, Elliott [see interview on page 571] ladles tracks from The King and I, Flower Drum Song, and South Pacific over glimpses of a town in which the kids use dogs for target practice and malcontents who try to leave are shot m the back. The juxtaposition is supposed to be amusing, but the Brechtian smugness of it all sticks in our craw. The only moment when the device achieves a bizarre power is a funeral procession to a pyre of garbage in which the deceased, her hair crowned with a crucifix of beer cans, is hoisted m a chair to the strain of "You'll Never Walk Alone."

Otherwise, this is a resolutely unpleasant movie. As our American cicerone into the land of Woop Woop, Schaech (a next-generation George Hamilton who is about to be everywhere) is affable enough without ever suggesting that he has the cojones to be a con artist. The camera lingers over his butt with leering frequency, a sop, perhaps, to Elliott's Priscilla fans, who may also find momentary solace in disco arrangements of "I Cain't Say No" and "There Is Nothing Like a Dame." Rodgers and Hammerstein, to be sure, are rock-and-rolling in their graves.