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Mad Max (1979)

★★★½ — Mad Max (1979)

Mad Max arrived in 1979 as a genuinely scrappy piece of Australian genre filmmaking, shot on a reported budget of around $350,000 and going on to gross roughly $100 million worldwide, making it one of the most profitable films ever made relative to its cost at the time. It was the debut feature of George Miller, a former emergency room doctor whose experiences treating road accident victims informed the film's bruising approach to vehicular carnage. Mel Gibson, then a virtually unknown stage-trained actor fresh out of the National Institute of Dramatic Art, landed the lead role after accompanying a friend to the auditions. The film came out of the mid-1970s wave of assertive, low-budget Australian cinema (sometimes called the Australian New Wave), a period that also produced Picnic at Hanging Rock and Breaker Morant, though Mad Max was considerably more interested in horsepower than heritage.

The best bit is the car Mad Max is one of those must-see films that isn't THAT good. The main villain Toecutter is absolutely brilliant though. Super sinister. It can't really work out exactly what setting it wants. It's post apocalyptic but it's still quite civilised. The effects and the violence are pretty good. Music is great and like I said the car is fantastic. Mad max 2 is way better

Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1979 | Watched: 2025-05-03

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