BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (33 OF 100)

 

"Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" (1985),
Dir: George Miller and George Ogilvie

$12,305,523 Budget vs. $36,200,000 in Gross

 

Haven't done one of these in a while and there's reasons. First, the return to my production roots: commenting less, producing more, and trying to build a minor Youtube army. Second is that I could not honestly think of any bad movies worth seeing lately. There are endless to choose from, but not many with redeeming qualities... Then I saw the new Mad Max trailer, and bingo! For this article, I picked the last of the trilogy, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. It's not the worst in the series, but not the best. I could easily have picked the first movie, but to be honest, I can’t argue it being worth the time. Yes, it’s got a younger, more Australian Mel Gibson in it. He plays a semi-future cop who turns his car into a weapon. But really, that’s it...

  

Other than being Mel's debut and us seeing Max go nuts (the murder of his wife and child... very Death Wish), it doesn't really hold much water to the rest of the series. You could watch the sequel and know all you need to know about the character from the title. (“Oh, he’s mad. I get it... Moving on.”) The first felt to me like a cheap superhero movie to me. When you hear people talk about Mad Max, usually they are referring to the second movie in the series, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, thinking it's the first one. Road Warrior has it all, from the crazy outback car chases, to the psychotic feral-people, to Lord Humungus, to that boomerang kid, to an epic car chase that made cinematic history. It’s kind of a masterpiece… And what does Thunderdome have? Well, it has Thunderdome!!

And as you can see, Thunderdome is f%$#ing awesome! That one sequence makes the film. The rules: two men go in, one man comes out. Pretty simple set-up... except Max has to take on the feared Master-Blaster (Blaster being a mindless goon, and Master being the midget who instructs him). It's pure cinema genius... and then it's over. And unfortunately, so is the rest of the movie.

After the glorious first-half of the movie, Max gets banished from Bartertown (which was actually parodied brilliantly by South Park). He goes on a new adventure and finds all these weird lost children, but after Thunderdome (without argument, the high-point of the film), it's hard to care. Firstly, the kids can hardly communicate with Max, which makes it kinda boring. Secondly, there’s this long journey to this passenger plane that they found, which apparently functions as a relic of the old-world and not a plot point. Now, me being a kid and the Mad Max movies usually being about vehicles, I thought this plane would be their escape from this terrible place. At the point in which they brought in The Pilot character from Road Warrior (the closest thing Max has to a friend in the series), I almost sure something was gonna come of this stupid plane… and it didn’t. So what was the damn point of putting it in there?! Planes aren't f&^%ing cheap!

The other major weak-point of Thunderdome for me was the casting of Tina Turner as the matriarch of Bartertown, Aunty Entity. Even as a kid, it never felt right to me… perhaps because it's glaringly Tina Turner, and not a movie character. But even then, I gotta ask myself when comparing this to Road Warrior (which has no shortage of misogyny and graphic rape), how did Aunty Entity acquire so much power in this f&#*ed-up, male-dominated world? Maybe she sang for them.

The movie is directed by two different directors and really feels that way at times. I can't really comment too much on the second-half of Thunderdome really, because I can't remember much. It's like the second-half of Stripes or Full Metal Jacket. Pretty forgettable, especially in comparison to its grand opening. That doesn't bode well for the last chapter in any series. Mad Max doesn’t end on a whimper, people. Mad Max ends on a kick to the nuts.

 

This is why the new Mad Max movie excites me. Whether a reboot, remake, re-launch, re-whatever, the original Mad Max franchise was rocky from the get-go and could use a jump-start. The last edition was in 1985 and the world of Mad Max was arguably not really created until the second movie, and then came to a grinding halt mid-third. So there is lots of ground to be covered and a new audience to enjoy it. Thunderdome is worth seeing because it gave us a glimpse of Max’s world when all the cars and explosions stop for a second… and then we get thrown into a messed-up Roman arena of pure awesomeness.

Check out this review of the second Mad Max film Road Warrior by my hetero-lifemates Seamus and Joe at Movies For Dudes right here.