Product: Mad Max (1979)
Rating: 4.0
How to do it on your own
'Mad Max' is an advertisement for all would-be directors to just take up the 16mm device and damn well shoot. Although the present era is less friendly towards this move, just look at how a crock of dung like 'The Blair Witch Project' managed to make it to the cinema. This first installment in the Max trilogy finds a very young Gibson beginning with perfunctory zest, but soon becoming beset with rage at the loss of his friends and family. While the acting is above-board all right, the real stars of the show are the automotives themselves. With the Pursuit Interceptors running as thinly-veiled Datsun heaps, who could have thought that so much hps could have been squeezed out of every car in this picture? Extra kudos go to Toecutter's gang. If you look very carefully at the bit where Max, fresh out of the hospital where's he learnt that his wife is in critical and his son dead, charges the bikers on the overcross bridge, you will see that the biker with the red helmet gets his neck broken by the distended front wheel of his or a comrade's cycle! Ouch. I wonder if he died in real life. There's so much in here that is amateur pulling through as professional-looking, who knows how Miller was able to direct it. At any rate, the choreographer must have been ripping hairs. The movie itself is just the right length and the ending is bleak and suggestive for a sequel. The post-apocalyptic vein was handled in a novel way, showing how present-day elements could co-exist with the Beginnings of the End. All in all, to sum this up in three words: cars, violence and good plot. Did I say violence, already?