Welcome to Woop Woop

Welcome to Woop Woop is a 1997 Australian screwball comedy film directed by Stephan Elliott and starring Johnathon Schaech and Rod Taylor. The film was based on the novel The Dead Heart by Douglas Kennedy. "Woop Woop" is an Australian colloquialism referring to an inexact and extremely rustic and uncivilised location, usually in rural or remote Australia. Equivalent terms include "the boondocks" and "out in the sticks" in American English or "the back of beyond" in British English.

The film centres on an American traveller in Australia who is abducted and held captive in a dystopian cult. Similarly to the way the Coen Brothers' film Fargo, and its spin-off TV series mocks stereotypes about the culture of Minnesota, Welcome to Woop Woop's characters are wildly exaggerated and parodied stereotypes of Anglo-Australian Bogans from Outback desert communities.

Teddy (Johnathon Schaech) is a New York City con artist, womaniser, and exotic animal smuggler who travels to Australia after a deal goes awry, his latest shipment of rare tropical birds escapes, and must be replaced. While driving through an arid desert in the Northern Territory, he picks up a hitchhiker, Angie (Susie Porter), who seduces him and asks him to drive her to the beach, as she has never seen the ocean before. After a brief and sexually ravenous 'courtship', Angie proposes marriage after they reach the seaside and when Teddy pretends to accept, Angie knocks him unconscious. When he awakes, he finds himself stranded in Woop Woop, a rusty, desolate, and dilapidated hamlet within a crater-like rock formation in the desert of central Australia.

Angie's father, Daddy-O (Rod Taylor), explains that as he has "poked her" more than once, Teddy and Angie are now considered "married" and no objections will be tolerated. Furthermore, no one ever leaves Woop Woop, on pain of death, without Daddy-O's permission, "and that is never given."

As he listens and observes, Teddy learns that Daddy-O runs Woop Woop in a brutal, cult-like, and dystopian manner, that he disguises as a commune (he and the other town elders keep the best luxuries for themselves in secret while doling out only canned pineapple and sub-par tobacco to the other members).

Woop Woop's only income source is the sale of canned dog food made from the ground-up meat of road-killed kangaroos. The only entertainment permitted by Daddy-O are old Rodgers & Hammerstein films, whose soundtracks play constantly over a loudspeaker. Meanwhile, Daddy-O and the other elders have working televisions and secretly watch football games and drink expensive beer. Comparing Daddy-O in an angry soliloquy to the Fundamentalist Mormon cult leaders with private arsenals of assault weapons that he has heard about in the past, Teddy, who had thought he was having a meaningless hookup "with the best f--- in the Southern Hemisphere", is enraged that she instead, "set me up."

After he angrily stands up to Daddy-O, Teddy learns the truth. Woop Woop was an asbestos mining town before an accident in 1979. The mine was closed down, Woop Woop was abandoned, turned into an Aboriginal Reserve, and literally "erased" from the map. Not content with the deal given to them by both the government and the mining company (resettlement in Australia's heavily populated southern coastal cities), they secretly returned to the ghost town of Woop Woop. At first, they repopulated themselves incestuously, but this caused wide mental instability. A rule was then enacted ("Rule #3: Don't diddle your cousins", which Daddio enforces by both corporal punishment and the infanticide of all disabled babies following birth). Since then, outsiders like Teddy have been occasionally kidnapped and kept against their will to deepen Woop Woop's otherwise extremely shallow gene pool.

Although other commune members now admire him for being the only person who dares to stand up to Daddy-O, Teddy hates living in Woop Woop and finds his "marriage" to the needy, overly controlling, and possessive Angie, even though she is also a blonde sex addict who looks like a model, both physically and emotionally exhausting. Seeking to escape, Teddy repairs his VW van, which has been vandalised by the locals, only to have it vandalised once again by Daddy-O.