(Ha ha, monthly updates?? Who knows!)
I’ve
figured that making Wednesday nights ‘Hump Day Movie Time’ is a fun idea after
all so I fired up Netflix and like always, watched the first thing that caught
my attention faster. This time around I went on a nostalgic trip finding Mad
Max, apparently they recommended it to my nephew because he had been watching
Young Justice. Good for him! Pretty sure I was his age when independent Puertorrican
TV station Super Siete, today known as TeleIsla, would show it constantly,
probably once every month! A small bit of mockery from all this back in the
day, this being a local network they would show a dub in Spanish of this movie.
And at my age at the time I would have fairly good bilingual skills, I knew
what ‘Mad’ meant, and that Max was a name obviously, but for some, admittedly
fitting reason, this dub would blare out in that thick Centralamerican accent
the title: “¡Motociclistas Salvajes!” (Savage Bikers)
Without fail my reaction and anyone sitting with me
on the family hall when that happened would be: “LOL what?!” He’s Max, and he’s
mad! Why couldn’t these people ever go with that? ‘¡Max El Furioso!’ or ‘¡La
Furia de Max!’, that would’ve made more sense for conventional translating! Of
course when you revisit a classic like this as an adult you figure a couple of
things out, Max is the protagonist but the movie is Toecutter’s biker gang, and
the idea of being trapped in a Dystopia with these sinister savages. It’s something
of a speculative horror from decades ago, movies like this, Escape From NY,
Terminator, Predator, they all get this reputation of being testosterone-driven
manly and brainless. Mad Max in specific for all the cool bikes and his revved
up raging muscle car, and the sequels to these movies gladly run with that, but
watching again you get this idea that at the start it was meant to disturb. For
instance in Escape From NY, once Snake makes his landing and the movie starts
proper, you get reminded this is a John Carpenter movie with the killer thriller
synthesizer playing as he’s being stalked without noticing by the first
wandering psychos in the island that spot him. I read some time ago that this
was meant to be satire and critical for how violent New York and every other
big city in the US had become during the 80’s, so that should make it doubly
meaningful. So, returning to Max, the bikers most definitely become the movie
in this sense not when they wrecked that flashy hot rod earlier or even when
they set Goose on fire, but at the climax stalking his wife on her way back
from the beach, and how from there it all progressively goes to Hell.
This was fun to revisit figuring that out, and
another thing I’d like to mention is how I’m more into this state of the
dystopia in the series than how it gradually got worse in Road Warrior and
Beyond Thunderdome.
For the last time: GET, OFF, THE STAGE‼
I know these sequels were the true codifiers of the post-apocalypse
and inspired some of the best anime and videogames of all time like Fist of the
North Star and even to this day Borderlands. But this one being closer to the
near future, it just seems not only more believable for the time but also more
creative. You get the sense that there’s a lot more to look at with a society
trying to keep it together after the big unnamed near future collapse, instead
of the barren soulless wastelands of the sequels that all look the same. It’s a
bigger effort to sell you the balls to the wall bizarre idea of the future they
had when they made this movie, with the settings like the remote police station
and how the chief is trying to run it, and all the other characters like
Toecutter himself or his right hand man Zanetti, a random punk that looks like
he stepped right out of a Depeche Mode video, feeling more intimidating than
some generic burly 10 foot grunt wearing football armor just to get poked to
death by Kenshiro. Revisiting this he became my favorite character, probably
because of how I couldn’t even remember him when I was younger with the strong osmosis of
those burly bikers, making anyone think they’d all just plain look the same at every turn.
And that’s just it, this became a hit because it was
also full of personality. And today it’s still great to watch, so consider this
blog highly recommending it. Unfortunately the series had to evolve into something
different, it was still successful like that, and it doesn’t mean I don’t like it
either. Color me now even more hyped for Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy on Fury
Road next year.
But mostly Charlize Theron.
- AA
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