Mad Max (1979)

I'll be taking a look at the first in the Mad Max series in anticipation of next months bonkers-looking sequel, Mad Max: Fury Road, starring Tom Hardy as the title character. Parts 2 and 3 for the sequels coming soon...

Max Rockatansky (Yep.) began the existing trilogy as a member of the Main Force Patrol. Basically, they are the police in an apocalyptic wasteland.

Although, the apocalypse is pretty toned-down in this first film of the series. While there are clearly some bad people (the first call the MFP gets is for a cop killer and his moll), we also see a family with an RV trailer, a diner, a tow truck ready when the pursuit gets messy, a news broadcast, and a nightclub at one point. It's almost as if no one's really heard that the world has ended...or it hasn't ended completely.

Oh, and Max has a family. Specifically, a saxophone-playing wife and an infant...who plays with a gun?

She's soooo damn SAXY.

Clearly, Max and his wife are responsible parents.

Max's home life is idyllic, but the Halls of Justice are a crumbling heap of the former establishment.

Who put that Stop Sign there?

It doesn't take much work to figure out what to expect. After Max kills the cop killer and his moll (though he doesn't so much kill them as chase them into having an accident...so, not exactly the best police work, but still...foreshadowing!!), a motorcycle gang swears revenge on him. You know, like motorcycle gangs do.

After the apocalypse, psychopaths have really strong friendships with other psychopaths.

After a scene where the motorcycle gang gets to show us how mean they are, Max and his partner capture one of the gang, but the guy gets off on a legal technicality (the legal system still exists after the end of the world, also on its last legs). In retaliation for all this, the motorcycle gang burns Max's partner. And Max gets...you guessed "Mad" didn't you? Well, not yet. Instead, he gets...insomnia.

To cure this insomnia, Max quits the Main Force Patrol to live a safe life with his wife and baby. They take a vacation in a station wagon, buy a dog, and lay in wheat fields. The perfect post-apocalypse vacation for any lawman.

Dog-buying...

...station wagoning...

...and field-lying.

Then, the motorcycle gang kills Max's family and he gets...Mad (finally).

"Can I outrun these motorcycles?" Nope.

Mad Max steals the Pursuit Special car and pursues the motorcycle gang to (special) death.

Max was "driven" Mad...get it??

Overall, Mad Max is a barely-post-apocalyptic movie of the car-mageddon variety. It's a solid start to the series, but only hints at the potential to come. Like so many revenge films, it takes a while to get going. Max is given some scenes of motivation and characterization, but ultimately, if you've seen the others in the series, you're tapping your fingers waiting for the action to start. Things don't really get going until the last 15 minutes of the film. It's a significant film due to its place in Mel Gibson's career and as the precursor to many later Ozploitation films, but may not hold up to the expectations of a modern audience.

Psychomania (1971)

I haven't actually been watching this movie for the first ten minutes.  There's a certain point in the timeline of watching movies like this that you realize the first twenty minutes or so are pretty much just hanging on the front like a skin tag.  Nothing useful there.  And if you look it too closely, it'll hang with you when you try to look at the rest.  And then when you look away too.

Well, this film might be doing some ridiculous thing where it's trying to make sense and establish the undead biker gang, a magic mirror, a toad, and impetulent teens as a logical story, but I wouldn't think so.  I tuned back in mentally when some guy was looking through the mirror on the wall and seeing a frog.  And then watching as that frog morphs into...Alright, confession time.  We've known each other for a little bit now.  I feel like I can be honest with you.  To be truthful, I just re-wound (there's a word you don't see much anymore!  urwelcome) to re-assess and realized that I still don't know what the heck is happening in this film.  I mean, the frog turned into a kid running through a cemetery then into an infant and the dude watching just starts to go nuts.  Am I missing out on some social references here?  Is there some cypher I haven't yet cracked to put me in touch with this film?

And then we snap back to the undead biker gang.  Connection?  No thank you, say the filmmakers.  We'll stick with our avante-garde.  What's the viewer get out of it?  Kids on bikes being invincible and tearing shit up.  Again...urwelcome.

The basic message here?  If you believe you'll come back to life after killing yourself, you will.  Maybe not the most responsible thing to pass on to an impressionable emo-generation.  But whatever.  All in the name of entertainment.  Besides, it's British.  70's British.  What else can you say?

Just keep teenage bikers from actually wanting to actually die and everything will be okay.

Wait.  That's actually decent advice that makes some sense.

How did that happen?

Bitch Slap

Alright. Who doesn't love naked/nearly-naked/scantily-clad/sparsely-dressed/nude-ish/overly bare women? You show me someone who doesn't love them, and I will show you someone whose soul is mal-adjusted. Straight women love women. Lesbians love women. Even a bunch of gay dudes out there dig on the female form sans the attraction aspect.

Bitch Slap focuses on this from the start without being too much about breaking "type." In the first five minutes there's a group of women who've taken some dude hostage in their trunk. That's no the problem. The problem is, one of them is almost reduced to tears when he sends a harsh word her way. At this point, I'm still hoping that the film might be about everyone stepping into baddassery. Later, there's the obligatory lesbian scene. It's grindhouse. I dig it.

Come to find out, this movie has absolutely no clear direction. One second, it's the "play on grindhouse movies" movie. The next, it's jamming in some heavily green-screened scene straight out of the live action Speed Racer Movie. And suddenly she's using a hair-pick to interact with a computer and there's some serious green-screen again. Then we're back to the grindhouse. And to some scene that would look appropriate coming from a cutscene on an early 90's computer game (see below).

(trust me, you'll want to watch the following)

Maybe I don't get it. There might be some serious genius going on here. To be honest though, the use of all of these different filming techniques might be interesting in its variety, but their overuse raises the question of whether these choices were made deliberately...or haphazardly. I can see little evidence of one - and a lot of the other.

But then again, I do love sexy women doing their acting-things, dripping in their own sexiness. While being sexual.

So, the lesson here is: If you're going to just hit one note in your movie...

Boobs is never a wrong answer: