Bad Boy Bubby

Bubby is a 35-year-old man who has never set foot outside his mother's dingy apartment in the back of a printing press in an industrial area of Adelaide. In addition to beating and sexually abusing him, she confines him to the apartment, telling him that the air outside is poisonous and telling him he will die if he tries to leave. Bubby eventually escapes, joins up with a rock band, and embarks on a confused, nihilistic journey of self-discovery and shocking mayhem.

• Nicholas Hope as Bubby
• Claire Benito as Mam
• Ralph Cotterill as Pop
• Carmel Johnson as Angel
• Paul Philpot as Paul (singer)
• Mark Brouggy as Mark (roadie)
• Todd Telford as Little Greg
• Paul Simpson as Big Greg
• Stephen Smooker as Middle Greg
• Peter Monaghan as Steve
• Rachael Huddy as herself

Shortly after he had graduated from film school, Rolf de Heer and Ritchie Singer collaborated on the idea of what would eventually become Bad Boy Bubby. For most of the 1980s, de Heer collected ideas and wrote them on index cards. In 1987, he took a hiatus from making Bubby index cards, but in 1989 he resumed work. Sometime between 1989 and 1990, he saw the short film Confessor Caressor starring Nicholas Hope (which would eventually be included on the bonus DVD when Bad Boy Bubby was first released on DVD in 2004) and tracked him down. In 1991, he began work on the actual script.

After he heard a rumour about the reintroduction of the death penalty to Australia, de Heer was angered and rewrote the ending so that Bubby would be executed at the end of the film. This ending was scrapped when the rumour proved to be false.

The people with cerebral palsy Bubby meets at the 1 hour 30 minute mark are not actors, but actual disabled people. Hope, a devout Catholic, found the scenes where Bubby curses God in front of Angel's parents difficult to film.

Director de Heer describes the film as one large experiment, especially in the method used to record the dialogue: binaural microphones were sewn into the wig worn by leading actor Nicholas Hope, one above each ear. This method gave the sound track a unique sound that closely resembled what the character would actually be hearing. The film also used 31 individual directors of photography to shoot different scenes. Once Bubby leaves the apartment a different director of photography is used for every location until the last third of the film, allowing an individual visual slant on everything Bubby sees for the first time. No director of photography was allowed to refer to the work of the others.[3]

When the film was released in Italy, a coalition of animal rights groups tried to set up a boycott of Australian products, alleging that Bubby's pet cat was wrapped in plastic wrapping and suffocated to death on film, but Rolf de Heer has said that none of that is true; the cat scenes were carefully filmed, with a veterinarian and animal cruelty inspector on set. Nicholas Hope, in an on-stage interview included on the DVD of the film, says there were two cats, one of which became a pet of a crew member. The other was a feral cat that was put down by a vet after filming (as with most feral cats that are caught in Australia).[4] Film critic Mark Kermode left the screening due to the apparent animal abuse in the making of the film.[5]

On 23 April 2007, Eureka Entertainment released Bad Boy Bubby on DVD for the UK market with all scenes intact. On the Blue Underground DVD, director Rolf de Heer claims that Bubby was the second highest-grossing film in Norway in 1995, second only to Batman Forever. In the UK, it was cut for cruelty to a cat.[6] The film was released on DVD in April 2005 by the Blue Underground company, and a special Two Disc Collectors' Edition was also released in June 2005 by Umbrella Entertainment.

David Stratton, film critic for The Movie Show praised Bad Boy Bubby. He awarded the film five stars out of five, remarking, "I really think this is one of the finest and most original of all Australian films that I've seen. I really think it's a milestone in Australian cinema".[7] It also holds an 83% approval rating on review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes based on 6 reviews, with a weighted average of 6.75/10.[8]

• Cinema of Australia

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Bad Boy Bubby

• Bad Boy Bubby at IMDb
• Bad Boy Bubby at Oz Movies
• A review of Bad Boy Bubby and the Two Disc Collectors' Edition by DVD Times
• Vertigo Productions – Rolf de Heer's official website
• Umbrella Entertainment
• Blue Underground
• Eureka Entertainment
• Bad Boy Bubby at the National Film and Sound Archive