Following the death of his family, a grief-stricken man straps on his leather duds (which Miller never fails to fetishize) in order to do battle with the psycho killers who appear to have risen from the ether of his subconsciousness. One doesn’t have to go looking too hard for a gay subtext in Mad Max. Mad Max also has a distinctly Australian masculine tension that’s reminiscent of other outback-set classics such as Wake in Fright, as it’s concerned with the pronounced sexual repression and frustration of a predominantly male population that’s all dressed up in tight leather with little to do apart from mounting their bikes and revving up their big noisy engines. The 1979 film most explicitly riffs on delinquent racing movies and the kinds of crudely effective 1970s horror movies that would sometimes show a family being violated in a prolonged fashion, and there are sequences in Mad Max that could be edited, probably with few seams, into, say, Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left. Though the second film, most commonly known in America as The Road Warrior, is often cited as the masterpiece of the series, the original Mad Max is still the most ferocious and subversive. Within this consciously simple narrative framework, director George Miller created two of the greatest of all action films, fashioned one of the most influential pop-cultural visions of the post-apocalypse, and capped it all off with a spectacularly wrongheaded kid’s movie. The plots, which are nearly irrelevant, are primitive even by the standards of low-budget genre films: In a bombed-out future version of the outback, a vicious gang pisses off a brilliant highway daredevil, Max (Mel Gibson), and stunning vehicular mayhem ensues.
#TARGET MAD MAX FURY ROAD 4K MOVIE#
The original Mad Max trilogy is the work of a talented virtuoso who blended seemingly every trope of every movie genre into a series of punk-rock action films.