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Year: 1981 Production: Mad Max Pty. Director: George Miller Starring: Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence, Emil Minty, Mike Preston, Kjell Nilsson Screenwriter: Terry Hayes, George Miller, Brian Hannant 96 minutes; Color
The success of the first film in this series, Mad Max (1979), generated a bigger budget for this, the second. It was well used, and this is a more sophisticated film, more purely sf than its predecessor. The oil wars have left a devastated world; petrol is a medium of exchange, and its conspicuous use - by burning it up on the roads - confers status. Ex-policeman Max Rockatansky (Gibson) gives reluctant assistance to a semicivilized group in a desert fortress. Possessing a valuable petrol supply, they are beleaguered by a tribe of marauders (who, in this Western replay, are effectively Indians), designer-barbarians in fetishistic gear on motorbikes and vehicles of war. Made with poker-faced humor, and this time with the US prints allowed to retain Mel Gibson's Australian drawl, the film is enlivened by small details - e.g., the Feral Kid (Minty) with his razor-sharp metal boomerang - and has much to recommend it beyond the tautly directed scenes of vehicular warfare. Poignant use is made of memories when times were better. The name of the sleazy real-world coastal resort Surfer's Paradise is now only half-remembered, as "Paradise", and ironically the place becomes the Promised Land to which the civilized remnant (minus the loner, Max) finally treks. With all its comic-strip energy and vividness, this is exploitation cinema at its most inventive. |
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