Popular Sydney drag queens Mitzi (Hugo Weaving) and Felicia (Guy Pearce) join transsexual Bernadette (Terence Stamp) on the long trip to Alice Springs, where they’ve been signed to perform in a bush hotel. Along the way, there’s revelations, bonding, arguments and encounters with strangers, all bumped along by a great soundtrack and the occasional laugh. In other words, it’s your basic road movie, featuring drag queens. Which means it’s twee, and in gay fantasy land from the word go. Though the tender and colourful Priscilla plays its laughs fairly well, it also pulls out the we’re-here-we’re-queer card, with predictably embarrassing results. The film's merits end up buried under trendy gay content, in this case, shrill and shiny-happy early-nineties gay.

Witticisms and double entendre abound as Felicia takes handfuls of recreational drugs, but never seems to come down off them, or have a mood swing/flu etc. (And I’d dress in full performance drag, dose up on ecstasy and acid and then hit the local stores in an Australian outback town – wouldn’t you?)

When Felicia has said night out at local outback stores and gets cornered by locals who want to beat her head in, we’re encouraged to feel empathy for her, and hate for her cruel attackers.

Horrible "homophobic" locals spray paint “AIDS FUCKERS GO HOME” on the side of the bus.

Etc., etc.

The film shows its inner-city roots (it was produced by a Sydney socialite and had an advisory panel of popular Sydney drag queens) with its presumption that all rural people are hick, violent and stupid – just because they don’t feel comfortable and familiar with a completely alien culture. When three fully dressed drag queens walk into a pub in Wallawallagonna or wherever what do you think is going happen? I’d like to see how a bunch of k-holed muscle marys would react if a truckload of sheep shearers with their wives and cattle dogs in tow poured into an inner-Sydney gay bar on a Saturday night.

Emblematic of the gruesome mid-nineties implosion of gay culture back into the suburban mainstream, the mediocre Priscilla (unfortunately) has a greatly disproportionate fame and cultural significance. It had considerable box-office success around the world, a best selling soundtrack and even won an Oscar*. With Muriel’s Wedding, it launched the parochial Australian cinema renaissance, and while it didn’t have the break-out success of Crocodile Dundee remains one of the most distinctive and famously Australian films ever made. A scene from the film was even re-enacted as part of the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games, when hundreds of marching drag queens filed into Stadium Australia behind a silver-clad colleague sailing along on top of a bus.