Movie Review: Mad Max Fury Road

To be fair, I should mention that I am a little partial to post-apocalyptic stories.

I've read and seen a lot of them...

And a big part of my love of this stuff came from seeing two big movies in the 80s, The Terminator which showed in a few brief examples what the world could look like, and The Road Warrior, which showed a post-apocalyptic world in all its terrifying glory.

So I'm a little biased.

At the same time, they were switching up the star, and I've seen a whole lot of disappointing sequels, reboots and re-imaginings when it comes to my favourite genres over the last few years, so I went in a little cautiously...

This movie was pretty fantastic.

Yes it was a little light on story, and yes the dialogue is pretty minimal.

But oh my god did I love seeing this on the big screen.

The fact that almost 80E% of what you will end up seeing is crazy car and physical effects rather than CG makes this to be one of the most visually stunning things I've seen in a long long time.

Will it end up on my DVD/Blu-Ray shelves?  Yes, no question.

Should you see it on the big screen while you still can?

Absolutely.

Bookmonkey Saw: Day 2

Okay, so today let’s look at the first film of the series, Saw (2004).  Created by Australian filmmakers James Wan and Leigh Whannel, the story is actually quite simple.  Two men wake up in an abandoned bathroom, chained by their ankles to pipes on either end of the room.  In the centre of the room is the body of a man who appears to have shot himself in the head.  In its hands are a tape records and a gun.  The two men manage to acquire the tape player and finding cassettes in their pockets which say “Play Me” (Obvious shades of Alice in Wonderland here), are informed that they have approximately 8 hours in which to escape, which will only occur for the one left alive at the end.

There is also a sub-plot focusing on two police officers who are hunting down a serial killer called “The Jigsaw Killer” who places his victims in horrible hurt-yourself-and-escape-or-do-nothing-and-die traps (such as they one our two leads are in).

As with many horror/thriller films, there will be plot-twists and discoveries, but I’m attempting to write without spoilers so I’ll go light on those.

In terms of the Horror genre in 2003/2004 when the film was released at the Sundance Film Festival and later released throughout North America , here is what was going on.

2003 Was filled with a lot of sequels and remakes, Dawn of the Dead (Remake), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Remake), and Freddy vs. Jason (considered parts 8 and 11 of the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13^th franchises respectively), as well as Van Helsing an homage to the classic Universal Monster movies of the 1930s.  Keep in mind that the Horror genre is one made of sequels and remakes; usually the producers and directors are working on their first or second film and horror films have always packed kids into theatres.

Saw worked in a very different way than the other options horror fans had at the time.  To begin, the killer is off screen for almost the entire film, second there is no female lead (one of the two men in the bathroom has a wife, but she is on screen for less than 10% of the film, mostly in flashbacks), and finally, although the story clearly owes concepts to both Mad Max (1979) and Se7en (1995 – which also focuses on cops trying to find an incredibly clever killer) Saw wasn’t an obvious remake or sequel.

Watching it myself I have to admit that the first film is kind of clever.  The on-screen violence is fairly minimal (you don’t see any severed body parts for example), and the story seemed innovative and quite smart for an incredibly low-budget film.  In the end, the movie did so well at the box-office a sequel was ordered with a release date set for the Friday before Halloween in 2005.

Bookmonkey Saw: Day 1

Okay, so lets join your pal Bookmonkey for a talk about the Saw-franchise of horror films.

In 2004 Lions Gate Films released a horror film which would dominate the horror genre in film for the next seven years and touch upon other formats ranging from comic books and video games to reality television.  It all began with...

Wait, first let’s go back to the beginning.

In 1979 Australian Cinema hit the mainstream with the film Mad Max.  The finale of this car-chase / revenge film has ex-cop Max Rockatansky (played by Mel Gibson) come upon one of the villainous thugs who murdered his wife and child early in the film.  Forcing the man to handcuff himself to a car, Max sets the vehicle on fire, brandishes a hacksaw and states:

Max: The chain in those handcuffs is high-tensile steel, it’ll take you ten minutes to hack through it with this. (tosses villain the hacksaw) Now, if your lucky, you can hack through your ankle in five minutes. 

Walking away from the vehicle as it burns, the audience hears the scream of the thug followed by the vehicle exploding.

The creators of the 2004 horror film Saw, Australians James Wan and Leigh Whannell, were both two-years-old when the first Mad Max film was released, but both state that the film, and specifically this scene “...was definitely a big, direct influence”(1) on Saw (2004) which has two men handcuffed to pipes in an abandoned building and facing the same dilemma.  

It is these connections, along with the fact that the Saw franchise had a new motion picture out the Friday before Halloween every year for seven straight years, and that the story expanded into other areas, including significant aspects of popular culture, that drew me to want to make an examination of the series.

As a long-time horror fan myself, but definitely one who prefers the monster movie sub-genre, I was of course familiar with the general idea behind the series, but until this month have not seen any of the central or related texts.  

1. Hartley, M. (Director and Writer) (2008). Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! [Film] Australia: City Films Worldwide.

Genre Character of the Week: Max Rockatansky

Realizing I hadn't talked about my personal favourite sub-genre (post-apocalyptic) in a little while, I figured that this weeks character should be a classic of that sub-genre for me - so I picked the character who first got me excited about the genre - Max Rockatansky (aka, Mad Max, aka The Road Warrior).

As a kid, I first watched Max in the film The Road Warrior on a cable network called Superchannel (a movie network in Canada). I had no idea that the film was a sequel and was simply in awe of this strange world filled with marauders and villains who terrorized anyone they came across. Max shows up as an emotionally shut down loner, completely unwilling to help the only group of decent people the film introduces us to, until he looses pretty much everything he owns and effectively has no choice.

What I loved about this film (not counting the costumes or that amazing boomerang!), was how in-depth it got into the character of Max without saying anything directly. It didn't tell me about Max, it simply showed me who he was. Max was someone who had lost everything and was merely surviving, not living. By the end of the film he begins to connect a little with the people around him, but for me this larger-than-life character started my interest in post-apocalyptic stories.

As an older teen I found Max Max and then re-watched the Road warrior just before Thunderdome came out. As a series, Max goes through a lot more emotionally than you would expect from your average run-of-the-mill action flicks. Although the last two films as they are among my personal favourites, check out all three if you want to see Max's entire journey - they are definitely worth the viewing.