Mad Max (1979)
Directed by George Miller
In the ravaged near-future, a savage motorcycle gang rules the road. Terrorizing innocent civilians while tearing up the streets, the ruthless gang laughs in the face of a police force hell-bent on stopping them.
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What critics compared Mad Max to
The film has the "Mad Max" mindset except instead of freakish muscle cars everyone rides altered BMX bikes.
While retro cinema has long become an overexposed trend in itself, "Turbo Kid" is one of the best examples, working as a nostalgic love letter and a cheesy spin on "Mad Max", making its timing pretty darn perfect.
After making a slew of shorts during the past decade, Montreal film collective Roadkill Superstars (RKSS) finally drops their feature debut Turbo Kid, into which they stuff Eighties Mad Max rip-offs and youth-driven B-movies (Solarbabies, BMX Bandits) in a blender to create a satisfying (if blood-drenched) smoothie of awesomeness.
A fun satirical flashback to 1980s “Mad Max” knockoffs and more juvenile post-apocalyptic adventures like “Prayer of the Roller Boys,” “ Turbo Kid ” reps the first feature (after numerous shorts) from Anouk Whissell, Francois Simard and Yoann-Karl Whissel, the Quebec trio known as RKSS (Road Kill Super Stars).
Turbo Kid on the other hand—written and directed by the trio of Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell—is a loving send up of the glut of cheap international post-apocalyptic knock offs that Mad Max helped spawn throughout the 1980s.
It is unsparingly violent, yet the target audience for this Mad Max meets BMX Bandits blood-gusher seems to be under-17 youth.
Following a former army captain and a small family surviving in Incheon, Peninsula combines components from I Am Legend , Mad Max , and the Fast & Furious series for a nonsensical joy ride that, while entertaining, lacks the sharpness of its predecessor.
Much more in the adrenaline-fueled, post-apocalyptic vein of Mad Max than your average zombie film, it’s a solid sequel to the original, albeit lacking the earlier film’s emotional heft.
At times it recalls two different “Mad Max” films (“The Road Warrior” and “Fury Road”), George A. Romero’s zombie sequel “Land of the Dead,” and, refreshingly, the “Fast & Furious” movies.
A handful of refugees return to the port city of Incheon on a ridiculous mission and discover survivors who've eked out an existence reminiscent of "Mad Max" meets "Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift."
Luckily Jung-seok is saved by a nice gang of survivors (complete with two cute kids), but Chul-min is grabbed by a sub-military mob of nasties who force him to outrun attacking zoms in a sort of Mad Max: Beyond Zombiedome , and later hit the road in a flotilla of cars stolen red-handed from every Mad Max movie, from the 1979 original to 2015’s Fury Road .
The elaborate Mad Max-like nighttime vehicular chase sequence through the ruined city comes to mind.
The film’s look, shaped under the direction of fist-time director (and Jackson protégé) Christian Rivers, draws on various familiar steampunk sources from Mad Max to The City of Lost Children to a few of Terry Gilliam’s adventures, while maintaining its own identity.
Speaking of which, the post-apocalyptic environment of Mortal Engines is loaded with visual cues from other films, from Mad Max to Waterworld to The Road to Terminator .
There's a milder, less demented Mad Max quality to the set-piece that decidedly rivets the attention, even if the sheer physics of it seem more than a bit preposterous; it's akin to a huge garbage truck consuming a lawn mower.
It's very reminiscent of the opening of the original "Star Wars" with the Star Destroyer pulling in Princess Leia's Blockade Runner (with a little of the submarine capture in "The Spy Who Loved Me" thrown in with some obvious "Mad Max" elements, too).
Indeed, this is the kind of visual spectacle where Jackson excels, like “Mad Max” meets “Godzilla,” with cool airborne metropolises, all manner of winged and wheeled vehicles, a Terminator-like undead robotic guy and dizzying action.
It's been a long time since Peter Jackson last made a good movie, and the dry spell continues with Mortal Engines, which answers a burning question: What if Mad Max: Fury Road had sucked?
The duo clearly did their homework while preparing for their comeback project; references to other cinematic apocalypses abound (biker gangs that could have ridden right out of Mad Max; a poster for the 1975 cult favorite A Boy and His Dog displayed in the background of one key scene) and the movie opens with a pre-title sequence that evokes the dark, desolate, ash-strewn world described in Cormac McCarthy's The Road more faithfully than the recent film version of that Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
The Bigger Picture: Considering that The Book of Eli combines the postapocalyptic milieu of a Mad Max flick with the brutal violence and gospel message of The Passion of the Christ, it's easy to imagine that it might become Mel Gibson 's favorite movie of the year.
If there is anything of even the least note about this film, it is that it's been quite a good long while since I can recall a post-apocalyptic film to invent so very little and to rip off the Mad Max movies quite so happily.
Yes folks we're in Mad Max, Terminator Salvation and even The Postman country as a grizzled, bible toting and quoting Denzel goes on his ‘lone wolf’ (or Littlest Hobo) mission to save humanity, one town at a time.
Eli, a former K-Mart store hand but clearly believing himself a Christian prophet, manages to escape the town alongside Solara but Carnegie and his stooges (led by Ray Stevenson) are hot on his tail across the desert wastes a la Mad Max.
The film’s marketing is deceptive because you’re given the impression this is first and foremost an action movie set in a dystopian future ala “Mad Max,” but instead, the movie gets bogged down in exposition about the significance of the central plot device.
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Former film critic Mendonça Filho is now three for three making exquisite films about social justice in his home country, this one, a futuristic Western a la Sergio Leone and “Mad Max,” his first genre film.
Entre el cine de Emir Kusturica y el de John Carpenter, con algunos pasajes que remiten a Mad Max (aquí también hay una disputa por el agua) y momentos en la línea del Cinema Novo de Glauber Rocha, Bacurau resulta una película potente en el terreno narrativo y visual (extroardinaria la fotografía de Pedro Sotero), tan provocadora como incómoda en su mirada de la lucha de clases y por el dominio de las tierras, aunque por momentos no demasiado sutil (ver el personaje del alcalde corrupto) y algo afecta al subrayado.
Y tras la excelente Aquarius, que hace tres años muchos veíamos incluida en el palmarés, y el jurado presidido por el australiano George Miller (Mad Max) ignoró por completo, al igual que a Toni Erdmann- su director, el brasileño Kleber Mendonça Filho y su compatriota Juliano Dornelles trajeron Bacurau.
Bacurau has an intriguing and suspenseful first hour before turning into a shallow and tedious blend of Mad Max and The Hunger Games.
With subtle echoes to likes of Mad Max, there’s a greater story here that while not always perfectly executed is still richly realized, making for a harrowing and effective piece.
But Bacurau is a much crazier enterprise altogether, crammed with elitist homicidal maniacs, nudists with blunderbusses, Mad Max types who consider Che Guevara less than manly, bikers in 1980s-gaudy costumes, and Udo Kier.
…after watching Brolin go full commando on feral invaders straight out of a Max Max casting call, it’s hard to disagree.
Meanwhile, the Reapers — ever-more feral gangs (and huge Mad Max fans from their attire and tattoos) — are rumoured to be roaming the countryside…
…from any number of zombie flicks to George Miller’s gonzo Mad Max action operas…
There is also a terrific, Mad Max-adjacent chase when Hig’s plane takes off while men on horseback try to overtake him.
…his Omega Man western that’s a not-so-mad Mad Max…
There’s the loyal dog of I Am Legend, the manic berserkers of Mad Max (though without their wit or characterisation) and even the bonkers future-nostalgia of Fallout at one point.
The movie wants to be more than it can be, so it ends up looking a bit strained in some places, although much of it is undeniably, viscerally effective, especially when Miller and cinematographer David Eggby (Pitch Black) get their cameras right in the middle of the automotvie mayhem ripping up the straight-line asphalt highways cutting through the Australian outback.
Resourceful as Fry is, though, she's uncomfortable in her new role—particularly when the planet's Mad Max-like landscape, thought to be uninhabited, suddenly turns treacherous.
If at times it is reminiscent of "Alien", "Mad Max" or of countless hilarious straight-faced science fiction B-movies, "Pitch Black" takes itself as seriously as it needs to and embraces every cliché it comes across like an old friend.
Special mention has to go to Eggsby, who used the same Coober Pedy, Australia, locations for the now-classic "Mad Max" (1979).
With this opening sequence, Pitch Black -- co-written by brothers Jim and Ken Wheat with director David Twohy -- asserts outright its derivative sources, quoting from the Alien, Mad Max, and Terminator series, Blade Runner, Fearless, Con Air, and The Fugitive, even Stagecoach, in the outlaw traveling with a group of "civilized" folks.
It's a tightly constructed genre picture, combining the best paranoid thrills of the "Alien" series with the setting of "Mad Max" and the anti-Utopian future of "Blade Runner."
There are plenty of references to previous MCU movies and non-Marvel movies, i.e. George Miller’s Mad Max franchise. The set piece for the villain’s headquarter seems to be modeled after the apocalyptic saga and Deadpool even makes a direct reference to the female heroine at one point.
Reynolds' quips make it clear that the resemblance to George Miller's Mad Max terrain is entirely intentional.
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Add in dollops of mordant Aussie humour - keeping zombies on ice in the same place as the beers - and the spirit of Mad Max, The Evil Dead and Peter Jackson's Braindead, and you have a tidy little package of tension, terror and tongue-in-cheek fun.
Zombies, dudes, guns, ostentatious weaponry, booze, and a bitchin' war vehicle straight from the pages of the Mad Max catalogue for the bored and lonely is all genre filmmakers this inventive need.
The model they're hawking is a lively crossbreed of Peter Jackson -style gore comedy of manners (a la "Dead Alive") and "Mad Max" post-apocalypse machine punk, in which brooding antihero Barry (Jay Gallagher), forced to sacrifice his turned wife and daughter, must traverse a zombiefied outback to rescue his sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey), who's been kidnapped by sadistic paramilitaries and subjected to a psycho doctor's evil experiments.
Kiah Roache-Turner’s zombie movie set in the Australian outback displays enough gonzo elements to please genre fans, with its resemblance to the Mad Max series clearly not coincidental.
And why does this whole thing remind me of “Mad Max”?
The pair’s intention to produce a hybrid of Mad Max and Dawn of the Dead results in an enthusiastic and enterprising horror that gleefully spurts fake blood from every available orifice.
…as well as a few borrowed bits of Mad Max-ish dystopia…
There’s a little Mad Max here.
With SUPERGIRL, written by Ana Noguera and directed by Craig Gillespie, it’s not only a down-in-the-mouth slog, but it’s so derivative of STAR WARS, MAD MAX, and yes, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, it makes me wonder if Gunn genuinely has the vision the WB executives thought he had.
…with the villains all looking like escapees from recent Mad Max films…