I grew up on these movies, and really love them even now as an adult - unsurprisingly, I get different impressions and takeaways at age 35 than I did at age 10.
Mad Max 2 is known in the USA as The Road Warrior, because the original movie was barely known here and the studios felt the audiences would be confused by the sudden appearance of a second movie. It's a really thrilling action movie that (in the American incarnation) starts with a sequence explaining how the how world structure rapidly and violently decomposed and left behind a wasteland with scarce resources and a real crime problem.
Mad Max the original, sadly, came out before the '80s, and thus is outside this blog. Suffice to say it shows how our hero Max becomes a wounded, dehumanized loner, avoidant and scornful of the rest of humanity.
The Road Warrior opens with Max and his dog scouring the landscape in a supercharged car looking for gasoline and supplies. They get in a running battle with some of the film's signature villains: leather-clad bemohawked future punks. Their outfits are pure S&M - leather and chains - their hairstyles pure late '70s punk style, and their motivation pure greed for gas and lust for violence.
A lot of the story revolves around the detached Max rediscovering his humanity and helping people (however unwillingly at first). His only companion when the film begins is his Australian Cattle Dog, who is perfectly cast and apparently had to be fitted with special ear plugs because he hated the sound of the loud engines.
The vehicle design in The Road Warrior is amazing. Strange hybrids between tanks and dune buggies, and what once might have been a police patrol car but now sports machine guns and spikes and nitrous oxide. Max's own V8 Interceptor is a glory to behold, with all its booby traps and spare fuel tanks and weaponry and the amazing supercharger. The look of the movie, both large and small, is just astonishing - it's no wonder it's influenced basically every post-Apocalyptic movie to come after it.
It's difficult to talk about the plot in any concrete way without spoiling everything - although many would argue this movie isn't really about plot in a traditional, linear sense. It's much more a character study of Mad Max himself - even though he only has about sixteen lines in the whole movie. The supporting cast is also great - 6'7" David Spence radiates intelligence and sly humor as towers above everyone in his gangly way as the Gyro Pilor. And, of course, there is one of the most menacing and unforgettable of movie villains - Lord Humungus.
Lord Humungus is played by Swedish bodybuilder and weight lifter Kjell Nilsson, and he's fantastic. As a kid I was legitimately terrified by him - a giant of pure muscle, who speaks in calm, rational phrases, wearing an iron hockey mask and wielding a scoped pistol that is stored in a special case with a death's head emblem. My only complaint is that he's given such a brief, forgettable death scene. Considering he's basically the Darth Vader of this movie, he deserved more.
It's undeniable that young Mel Gibson has tremendous star power. It's obvious from the first moments that he's destined for bigger things, athough it's debatable whether he ever really made anything that has quite the mojo of The Road Warrior. It was directed by George Miller and produced by his good friend Byron Kennedy. George Miller also directed The Witches of Eastwick, which I reviewed back in August of 2013 - feels like eons ago. Later he would make Lorenzo's Oil and Babe: Pig in the City and both Happy Feet movies, along with - of course, 2015's smash hit Mad Max: Fury Road.
The score to The Road Warrior is by Queen's Brian May (!). It was made for $4.5 million (Australian) and brought in a combined ~$35 million worldwide - a very good showing.
The sequel, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, was released four years later in 1985 and famously features Tina Turner as the mayor of Bartertown, the settlement where Max finds himself fiften years or so after the last movie. He is given a deal by Turner's character (Aunty Entity according to the script, but only referred to as "Aunty" in the film): eliminate "Master Blaster," the pairing of enormous hulk and tiny dwarf that run the energy-producing pig pits that the settlement depends on.
Master Blaster - actually two people who combine their strengths - is an intriguing character and I always feel disappointed that the fantastic Thunderdome battle ends with the two halves being split up. The "Master" half is played by little person Angelo Rossitto, who I remember seeing in Tod Browning's Freaks from 1932 (!!). He's fantastic in this, and deserves accolades. As does Tina Turner! She has as much screen presence as she does stage presence. She steals every scene she is in, and I wish she had made more films.
Beyond Thunderdome is both more ambitious and more flawed. The plot is "larger" both in set pieces (like the famous Thunderdome itself), and in message (which is awfully muddled and revolves around an oasis of children that Max stumbles across halfway through the movie and who stand in for "renewal" in a rather basic, generic way). This last part is the real letdown for me - the movie hits a brick wall halfway through when Max encounters a large band of naive Peter Pan-like children, survivors of a plane crash who mistake him for this mythical savior. The pace slows to a crawl, the characters are uninteresting in the extreme, and even Mel Gibson seems to flounder playing off these children. I yawned and yawned again.
The movie picks back up again, slightly, at the end with the return of Aunty and Bartertown - the two plots collide violently - but it never really regains its full momentum, and thus I think The Road Warrior is really the best representation of the Mad Max legacy. If you have to watch one, watch that one.
Shifting gears, Escape from New York (1981) was an instant favorite of mine, and the kind of movie that embodies "late night television movie" to me. When I was a kid, and Fox was still an upstart fourth network that showed risky shows like Married With Children and The Simpsons - which, believe it or not, were once considered way outside the bounds of normalcy. Both those beloved shows were considered vulgar and low-brow, watched only by outisders and unwashed troglodytes huddled in front of their dirt-smeared screens late at night, hooting like apes at crude jokes they only barely understood.
But Fox also ran a long series of late-night movies. I caught a ton of films that way, after my mom would go to bed, I'd sneak out and turn on the kitchen TV (which was black and white!) or, if I dared, the louder, closer color TV downstairs. I can't find ANY info on the net about the series of movies Fox ran, but I know Escape from New York was one of them.
Directed by one of my favorite modern directors, John Carpenter, Escape from New York tells the story of a future in which "crime has risen 400%" and all criminals in the country are sent to Manhattan (!), which has been walled off into an island prison (!!). The movie never explains how the owners of the most expensive real estate on earth are convinced to turn it into a giant prison. Of course, New York in the 1980s wasn't the New York of today - it was more of a grimy crime-sodden hell-hole, where people could probably more easily imagine walling it off.
Enter our hero, Snake Plissken, played by the great Kurt Russell in a sort of homage to Clint Eastwood. Snake has an eyepatch (for no explained reason), and was a war hero once, now turned bank robber. His turn against authority is only hinted at, especially in the film's closing moments.
As bad luck would have it, Air Force One is deliberately crashed into Manhattan, and the Preisdent is taken hostage by our villain, The Duke (Isaac Hayes!). It's up to antihero Snake to enter the city undetected, rescue the president, and make it out alive in time to stop WWIII ... or WWIV, it's hard to say. A great running gag involves multiple characters meeting Snake and saying "...I thought you were dead..."
The movie has a truly great musical score, also by John Carpenter, which is energetic and really fits the mood. The movie looks great at well, with lots of blacks, blues, browns, and greens, to showcase the grime and grit of New York City (although all the street scenes were actually shot in St. Louis!). The movie features strong supporting roles by Harry Dean Stanton, Ernest Borgnine, and Adrienne Barbeau, among others.
Carpenter is a really great director - besides this, he made The Thing, Christine, Starman, Big Trouble in Little China, Prince of Darkness, and They Live all in the 1980s. Made for $6 million, it grossed around $25 million, making this a big success.
No comments:
Post a Comment