![]() (Unless you count the railroad used for the climactic chase scene.) Consider that: a sequel to a movie called The Road Warrior and an earlier movie about a highway policeman has no roads in it. In fact, paved roads never appear anywhere in the film. The first time we see Max (whose name is spoken only once during the running time), he isn’t blazing down an empty two-lane blacktop in a turbo-charged car, but dragging a dead vehicle across sand dunes with a team of camels. The background is never the same: Mad Max occurs in a tottering dystopia, The Road Warrior in the aftermath of a giant war and global fuel shortage, but only in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome does the wreck of the world happen via mushroom clouds and fallout - “pocks-a-clypse!” The world is a much stranger place, turning toward a setting that borders on sword-and-sorcery. When I previously wrote about the three Mad Max films after a marathon screening, I noted each movie appears to take place in a different world. Seeing it now on Blu-ray makes me realize that I adore it - and not in spite of the passel of children, but because of them. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is a worthwhile movie that repays repeat viewings. Yes, it’s still the third best of the original trilogy, but consider how high the bar was already set: there’s no shame having to stretch a bit and not quite reach it. Beyond Thunderdome, viewed almost thirty years after its premiere, doesn’t feel like a horrible betrayal of what came before, but a natural outgrowth of its setting and storytelling. The drop in quality is nowhere near that between the two Dino de Laurentiis Conan movies. The simplistic comparison is to call Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome the Conan the Destroyer of its franchise: “the kid-friendly cheesy one.” But this comparison only applies to the level of violence. This was when the series went from an earned “R” rating to a family-friendly PG-13, and its rough wasteland-traversing hero came to the rescue of a clan of K-through-12s. The third film plays a lot nicer with other children than its predecessors: the low-budget exploitation biker/revenge flick of Mad Max and the violent action spectacle of The Road Warrior took a Spielbergian mid-‘80s shift that’s positively heartwarming. Now I can hold the movie marathon in my less-well air-conditioned apartment - with indoor plumbing and absolutely no Gila monsters! - because Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome made its debut on Blu-ray last week, completing the trilogy in hi-def.įor both fans and the general public, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome generally ranks below the other two movies, Mad Max (1979) and The Road Warrior/Mad Max 2 (1981). I prefer an air-conditioned theater and a marathon of the three films (to which a fourth will be added next year) over risking a Gila monster bite, however. If it weren’t for my aversion to camping and having to use porta-potties, I would attend Wasteland Weekend every year, a “360° post-apocalypse environment” held each September in the Southern California desert for other Mad Maxians. And I remember how it led us here and we were heartful ‘cause we saw the pan-and-scan VHS of what was. I sees those of us who got the luck and started the haul for hi-def. I’s looking behind us now, into history-back. ‘Cause what you hear today, you gotta tell the newborn tomorrow. This is the tell of us all who love the Mad Max franchise. The posts on Black Gate travel fast, and time after time I’ve done the tell. Starring Mel Gibson, Tina Turner, Helen Buday, Frank Thring, Bruce Spence, Robert Grubb, Angelo Rossitto, Angry Anderson, George Spartels, Edwin Hodgeman.
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