Mad Max

1979 was a stellar year for horror and sci-fi blockbusters: Alien, Phantasm, The Amityville Horror, The Brood, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Dracula—and that’s just to name a few.

Mad Max came roaring out of the badlands of the "Land Down Under" that year, helmed by George Miller, who would later direct the “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” segment for the ill-starred Twilight Zone: The Movie.

Mad Max front-loaded a franchise of post-apocalyptic comic-book tales of a high-octane future with scavengers and psychopaths—bad men of the post-nuclear war wastes—and the baddest moflicker of all: the noir anti-hero in hot black leathers, with an impossibly handsome, scruffy countenance, a national treasure who would one day torpedo his own incomparable career. Yes, you guessed it (you already knew): we’re talking about Mel Gibson.

In Mad Mel—er, Max—Mel is far younger, more clean-cut, and less of a hard-ass cynic. He lives in a future of anarchic, lawless renegades zipping around in souped-up cars and revved-up hogs, robbing, raping, and looting gasoline and other fine and frilly goods; and a modern coterie of highway patrolmen—cops in black leathers who act like roaming Wild West rangers—giving hot pursuit and high-speed chase to psychopathic highway-man vermin that often seem snagged from The Hills Have Eyes.

At any rate, one of the maddest of them, the “Nightrider,” and his bar-skank gal pal go riding around killing and tearing up jack. The lawmen smoke them, and Max’s good friend Jim “The Goose” Rains (Steve Bisley) does the honors.

It isn’t long, though, before Toecutter (Roger Ward), a really weird, somewhat portly Aussie version of Manson, and his gang show up—this includes the hyper-eerie, sexy, bleach-blonde badass psychopath Bubba Zanetti (Geoff Parry), one of the best things in the movie, and “Johnny the Boy,” a pathetic earthworm of a spineless criminal goon who knuckles under to Toecutter, and whose fate, as far as this picture is concerned, is not a happy one.

This film is full of good-looking dudes (and, as William S. Burroughs once said, “Why waste one?”). You’ve got Mel, Geoff Parry, Steve “The Goose” Bisley, and Roger Ward again as Fred “Fifi” Macaffee, the Chief of the Main Force Patrol (MFP), who is quite fetching with his sunglasses, bald head, and scarf. A total roll call of action-movie beefcakery. I’m so there, dude.

Toecutter and company terrorize a small town, and Johnny the Boy is captured. Let off by a liberal magistrate in a screwed-over system, the MFP—particularly The Goose—vow to get even with the motorbiking hoon.

Johnny the Boy ends up ambushing The Goose in a trap, and Goose gets cooked. Har-har.

The Goose, now a Johnny Got His Gun victim in a burn unit, Convinces Max (full name: Max Rockatansky) to walk away. He vows to quit the thankless, deadly world of dystopian policing and savor whatever passes for bourgeois life in this alternate-reality future world. To that end, he takes his wife to a farm retreat/hideaway with a crazy old woman who wields a shotgun, and her oafish, mentally impaired son.

And then here comes Toecutter and the gang. The old woman at the farm/commune goes total rogue commando and starts hefting around that shotgun, and even using it. Max’s baby is kidnapped; Maybe his old lady gets whacked, dig?

At the end, we have the poetry of inversion: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. It takes place on the hot, barren highway blacktop of the awesome Aussie landscape. Max Rockatansky strides out of this film and into cinematic cult legendry. The sun rises; the sun sets. The Earth scorches, and the world?

As Burroughs observed in Naked Lunch:

“It spins on to. Random. Insect. Doom.”

But Max—leather-clad badass—stands in the bulwark.

Excelsior!

Mad Max (1979)

Author's website

Author's YouTube

Read my book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Trash Volume 1

Ebook

Print

Read my book: Silent Scream! Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Edison's Frankenstein--Four Novels by C. Augustine

Ebook

Print