Here’s another movie from my grade-school years that I heard so much about but never got around to seeing in its entirety until now. Actually, it had more fame when I got to high school and it made the rounds through Cinemax or videotape.
I had seen The Road Warrior which was great but that was years ago so I may need to re-watch it to make sure it still is. I also wasted the money seeing Mad Max, Beyond Thunderdome which turned out to be as lousy as Terminator 2 because the anti-hero of the saga became a kinder, gentler type. Well, when Mad Max began its cycle through on my Dish’s movie channels, I wanted to see the film that started it all and is considered a key film in the Post-Apocalyptic-Future genre.
Once again, my younger self’s imagination must have embellished the coolness of a movie riddled with more downtime than a layover at the Delta hub in Atlanta. The overall story is that in a few years from now (aka the mid to late Eighties), roving gangs of bikers will terrorize the Australian countryside and an outnumbered, outgunned Main Force Patrol (Aussie Highway Patrol) tries to keep civilization safe (there’s nothing going on in the background to indicate civilization is unravelling though). Matters escalate between MFP and a biker gang when MFP’s best driver, Max Rockatansky, takes out a key member of a biker gang, the Nightrider. The bikers then proceed to kill another MFP officer and Max’s family. Max returns the favor by killing every member of the gang, one by one. When there’s an action sequence or car chase, Mad Max is alright despite the low-quality production values. These are really on at the beginning and end of the film. Everything else in between is the slow, tedious backstory of how Max loves his wife and child, Max wants to quit the MFP, the biker gang scheming their revenge, the biker gang raising hell in the countryside (it’s not the Outback because there’s grass, trees and barbed-wire fences) and the MFP guys getting frustrated over the System which keeps the bikers out of prison.
Australia must have been pretty starved for entertainment to make this a success before the era of cable and videotape distribution. Somehow it did well enough to warrant a better sequel which is really the only one worth watching. You can skip Mad Max and just go to The Road Warrior, all you’ll learn from the first movie is why Mel Gibson’s character limps.