Thunderstruck - my movie of the year

Generally at New Year's Eve, I have a sort-of tradition of re-watching (and showing others) the best movie I saw all year (not necessarily a movie released in that year). This year's was Thunderstruck, a 2004 Australian film.

It's a comedy road movie about 5 AC-DC fans who pledge as teenagers to be buried alongside Bon Scott (dead lead singer of AC-DC). 10 years later, one of them dies and the other 4 (who are basically a bunch of losers) come together to keep that promise by driving his ashes from Sydney to Fremantle, contrary to his family's wishes. It's a very Australian movie, and one that might not translate too well for an overseas audience. It's also a very AC-DC movie, so knowing something about AC-DC is probably important -- certainly you won't understand the band of bagpipers at the end of the movie otherwise.

Now the amusing thing is that life does imitate art. As AC-DC was part of our teenage years, having watched the movie and being a bit interested in cemeteries, we decided that when we get around to the West Australian holiday we occasionally talk about, we would include a visit to Bon Scott's grave in Fremantle cemetery. Then I read in the newspaper recently that one of the new "tourist attractions" of Fremantle is ... you guessed it, Bon Scott's grave. The tourist information people couldn't understand why everyone had suddenly started asking about it, until someone figured out the movie connection. So, clearly we aren't the only Whacko Jackos to be inspired by the movie to visit the cemetery.

I notice that Thunderstruck didn't get much of a rating on IMDB, but it is a somewhat niche movie, and I guess I am right in that niche because I loved it and it's my movie of the year. So there!