The Screengrab : the road warrior

Ozsploitation! The Best Australian Road Movies

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 01 May 2009 18:30:00 GMT

The Guardian claims to take a look at Australia’s best road movies, but they don’t even mention Roadgames, so how seriously can we take them? And there’s another Australian movie that prominently features cars and driving…it’s on the tip of my tongue…Mel Gibson…dog…leather…oh yes, a little something called The Road Warrior. Seriously, The Guardian, what are you trying to pull here?

OK, in fairness, the accompanying slide show does feature The Road Warrior (or Mad Max 2 as the Aussies insist on calling it), but still…no Roadgames. Instead writer Anneli Knight brings the love for The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and its director Stephan Elliott, whose latest film is another road tripper, Easy Virtue. “The beauty of a road trip is that you get to pass through so many different stories. Your standard Australian films are set around the kitchen sink but in a road movie you can visit, cause chaos and then move on,” Elliott says.

Novelist Nikki Gemmell (Cleave) sees the pitfalls of the Outback road trip. “Always in Australia you've got to be careful because there is not only the Wolf Creek scenario, there is the Walkabout scenario - you get lost. You have engine trouble, your car breaks down, particularly as you head up into Coober Pedy and head into roads in the NT. It could be days before a car comes past."

There’s also the Roadgames scenario…but alas. No love for it here.

Ozsploitation! “High Rolling in a Hot Corvette” (1977)

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Inspired by the terrific new documentary Not Quite Hollywood, the Screengrab is proud to present Ozsploitation!, our own survey of the golden age of Australian drive-in movies. Pop a tube, throw another shrimp on the barbie and try not to chunder.

I’ve had pretty good luck with my Ozsploitation selections…until now, that is. Granted, I had no reason to believe High Rolling in a Hot Corvette was any sort of lost classic. The title promises good times, but I learned long ago that such promises are not always kept by the exploitation film complex. Otherwise The Great Texas Dynamite Chase would be the greatest time I ever had (whereas in fact it barely cracks the top twenty). The only people who might have any interest all in High Rolling would be Judy Davis completists, as the actress makes her motion picture debut in it. She may leave it off her resume these days, but that’s why we love IMDb.

The fun begins in a Queensland carnival, where Tex (played by obligatory American import Joseph Bottoms, least of the acting Bottoms brothers) operates the shooting gallery on the midway. On a whim, he and Aussie buddy Alby (Grigor Taylor) decide to take a road trip, hitching a ride with a fella named Arnold in his snazzy corvette. When the gang stops at a motel for the night, Arnold makes an unexpected pass at Alby and an unpleasant bout of gay-bashing ensues. Tex and Alby make off in the corvette, little realizing that the boot (that’s the trunk, my fellow Americans) is full of marijuana.

Judy Davis plays a wispy young hitchhiker who plans to become a prostitute until Tex informs her that this will entail sweaty fat men squatting over her, belching and farting. She never really thought of it that way, but Tex is such an incredibly repulsive individual, this sort of thinking is second nature to him. Fellow Screengrabber Andrew Osborne and I have a little game we call Long Car Trip. For instance, he’ll say: “Long car trip – Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh?” Then I’ll have to pick one and come up with some sort of rationale for preferring to spend many hours trapped in a vehicle with this individual. In this game, Tex will always be the wrong answer – and yet here is a whole movie about taking a long car trip with him. Amazing.

The gang eventually ends up in Surfers Paradise, which is a real place that looks like this. A better movie would have done something more interesting with this unusual location (this is the “paradise” the Road Warrior refugees were trying to find), but in High Rolling, it’s just a scenic spot for Tex to pass out on his face. Eventually the plot kicks in again as the pot goes missing from the boot, the boys decide to hold up a tour bus, and Arnold and his buddies catch up with Tex and Alby for the big showdown. Unfortunately, they do not beat Tex to death with his own feet, which is really the only ending that would justify sitting through this irritating snoozer.

Previously on Ozsploitation:
Dead-End Drive In
Roadgames

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films of All Time! (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

13. OCTOPUSSY (1983)

Okay, to be honest, I’m the only one at Screengrab who voted for Octopussy as one of the best James Bond films of all time. But even though it’s been a long time since I saw it, I’m pretty sure I can safely stand by my vote. First of all...it’s frickin’ called OCTOPUSSY! Newspapers and TV stations across the United States (in the Age of Reagan, no less!) had to advertise what sounds like the dirtiest, freakiest porn flick of all time...how great is that? And to think many of those same newspapers and TV stations balked at revealing the full title of Zack and Miri...I only regret the MoviePhone Guy wasn’t around back then to say, “You’ve selected...Octopussy!” My friends and I would have called twenty times a day! Uh...but I digress. So anyway, aside from that bitchen title, the film also featured a pretty cool, well-paced story featuring an elephant chase, knife-throwing circus performers, a sweet fight on the wings of an airborne jet and a weird lady cult of acrobatic assassins. True, Roger Moore was really showing his age (and would retire after his next Bond adventure, the dreadful View To A Kill), and sure, the movie is goofy as hell...but, for me at least, goofy more often than not equals fine entertainment value.

12. THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977)

The apotheosis of Roger Moore; as you might expect, the secret was to build a hell of a show around the smirking old thing and give him something to react to. After the comparatively low-tech Man with the Golden Gun and the ugly-looking Live and Let Die, the producers decided to kick out the jams a little, and Ken Adam, the legendary production designer who'd worked on most of the Bond films of the 1960s and '70s, was encouraged to just go nuts. In addition to the sets, the movie boasts perhaps the most succulent and wittiest of the Bond babes -- Barbara Bach, a.k.a. Mrs. Ringo -- as well as a villain for the ages in Richard Kiel's hard-to-finish-off Jaws, and even a theme song (written by Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager and performed by Carly Simon) that you can still hear on the radio without throwing up in your mouth hardly at all.

11. LICENSE TO KILL (1989)

Timothy Dalton never got much love as James Bond, and with good reason: his interpretation of 007 was humorless and constipated, and one of his two at-bats in the role was 1987’s snoozer The Living Daylights, one of the dullest Bond films in the entire series. And while License to Kill played more like a feature-length Miami Vice episode than a spy caper, it was nevertheless a pretty good action movie. The villain (Robert Davi’s evil drug lord Sanchez -- based, at least according to Wikipedia, on real-life supervillain Pablo Escobar) gets his goons to feed ageless, indestructible CIA agent Felix Leiter to a shark (after raping and killing the poor bastard’s wife on their wedding night...a plot twist WAY too dark for any Bond film to carry), after which Dalton’s character goes rogue, resigning from M16 to get himself some payback. Once it gets past the gruesome downer of a set-up, however, the film introduces Carey Lowell as drug courier and CIA informant Pam Bouvier, one of the smartest, most charismatic “Bond girls” of all time, then continues to improves with a compelling cat-and-mouse battle of wits between Sanchez and Bond, featuring a peculiar Wayne Newton cameo (as a shady televangelist!) and climaxing with the best tanker truck chase this side of The Road Warrior.

10. LIVE AND LET DIE (1973)

Granted, this is something of a nostalgic choice. As I mentioned in the Top 007 James Bond Theme Songs list a couple of weeks ago, Live and Let Die was the first Bond movie I ever saw, and it took many years for me to get over the idea that Roger Moore was the 007. I'm aware that almost anything positive I say about the movie can also be held against it. For example, I could give it credit for having the most racially diverse cast in the series, but then I'd have to admit that some of the characters do not represent the most, er, enlightened portrayal of African-Americans on film. My theory is this: after the failure of George Lazenby, the producers weren't taking any chances in launching their new Bond, so they raided American cinema for all the trendiest action movie trimmings. The story pits Bond against a voodoo-dabbling heroin magnate and his Harlem drug ring, a convenient excuse to plunder the then-hot blaxploitation pictures for wild afros, gaudy cars and the latest in jive talk. When the action shifts to the American South, the movie just as shamelessly embraces the gators, speedboats and cottonmouth drawls of hixploitation. It almost turns into Smokey and the Bandit for awhile, with the arrival of peckerwood Sheriff Pepper. I can understand how the purists would object to all this, but I've always gotten a kick out of the voodoo vibe, Yaphet Kotto as the exploding villain Kananga, luscious Jane Seymour as the fortune teller Solitaire and Roger Moore running across a bunch of crocodiles.

9. CASINO ROYALE (2006)

For all its continued bankability, the Bond series was in a creative rut after four decades. Given the self-parody of the late Moore adventures, the lean Dalton years, and the diminishing returns of the Brosnan movies, how could the producers of the Bond films rejuvenate their cash cow? Why, with a reboot, of course! And what better way to do so than to double back and adapt Ian Fleming’s first 007 novel in the process? A new take on the series would require a new leading man, and Daniel Craig was just the man for the job -- younger, leaner, and meaner, here was a guy with bigger things to worry about than how his martinis were made. Casino Royale makes it clear from the outset that this is a whole new ballgame, when we first see Craig’s Bond undertaking the missions that earned him his license to kill -- filmed in stark black and white, no less. And through Craig’s steely blue eyes, we experience a fresh take on the usual Bond story -- no nifty gadgets, no villains bent on world domination, and no convoluted methods of torture (in a decidedly lo-fi touch, the captured Bond gets whacked in the tenders with a knotted rope). Of course, the action scenes are still pretty kickass, especially an early parkour-style foot chase. But what really makes Casino Royale special is Craig’s relationship with Vesper Lynd, played by the luscious Eva Green. Vesper is Bond’s equal in many ways, and the closest the character has come to finding his match since Diana Rigg in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. And this makes her eventual betrayal all the more effective -- not simply because of how much it messes our hero up, but also the lengths to which he must go to steel himself against the pain in the future. Essentially, Casino Royale finds James Bond becoming the 007 we all know, and when he finally states his name at the end of the film, we have no trouble believing him.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark

Visions of Change: Cinematic Utopias & Worst Case Scenarios (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:00:00 GMT

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

Before he went all screwy on us (or, rather, before we discovered how screwy he’d apparently always been), Mel Gibson starred in The Road Warrior (a.k.a. Mad Max 2), just about the purest (and best) action film ever made. By the end of 1979’s Mad Max, things are already pretty bleak for Gibson’s titular character, an ex-cop whose family and best friend have all been killed by anarchic speed demon terrorists. But things are much worse in the sequel: society has broken down completely, people are killing and dying for petrol and for some reason everyone is required to wear football shoulder pads. Our protagonist has become a leather-clad man with no name, roaming the Outback with only a dog (who, like anyone else that gets too cozy with Gibson’s character, is doomed from the start). Eventually, Max’s need for fossil fuel forces him to choose between a bunch of dirty socialists living family-style in a fortified compound and Lord Humungus’ torture-loving, not-gay-at-all free market enthusiasts, who spread democracy with cool wrist-mounted crossbows. The film’s fuel-depleted landscape is a wonderland for plucky, self-sufficient mavericks who like to shoot things from helicopters (or, more specifically, gyro-copters), but like most totally cool, under-populated places where you don’t have to think about anyone but yourself, the pedal-to-the-metal, smash-and-grab wasteland freedom of The Road Warrior eventually gives way to the pesky forces of civilization (complete with charismatic black leader) in 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

LOST HORIZON (1973)

It’s a cliché to say that one man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia; the only way to make it interesting is to show us why. Lost Horizon, a 1973 remake of a 1937 classic, sets out to show us how even the best human intentions can make a Hell of Heaven, and it certainly succeeds, but not in the way it intends. Instead of illustrating its point by skillfully telling how a group of outsiders come to Shangri-La and spoil its utopian purity with their unchecked desires, it illustrates the concept of a dystopia by being a really, really shitty movie. It’s hard to know exactly what the worst thing about this stink-bomb of a musical is: is it the crappy songs, surely the worst things ever to have Burt Bacharach’s name attached? Is it the bad acting from bad actors, or the worse acting from good actors? Is it Charles Jarrott’s incompetent directing, Larry Kramer’s wildly stupid screenplay, or producer Ross Hunter’s ability to spend gobs of money on a movie that looks absolutely terrible? Yeah, those are all good candidates, but for our money, the worst part is the decision to make it a singing, dancing musical and then cast people in it – the corpselike Peter Finch, the ungulate Liv Ullman, the bombed-out-of-her-mind Sally Kellerman, and the completely lost George Kennedy – who have no apparent ability to dance or sing. Let’s not even get into Bobby Van. Long unavailable for home audiences, Lost Horizon is a so-bad-it’s-just-incredibly-bad classic that screams for a DVD release.

BLADE RUNNER (1982)

Movies have shown us a near infinite number of futuristic dystopias, but few of them have seemed as plausible as the Los Angeles of 2019 in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece. Heavy enough is the basic plot, which is the stepping stone to all sorts of explorations on the nature of memory, the meaning of freedom, and what it is to be human: in the near future, big corporations provide humanity with perfect duplicates, android servants who do our dirty work so that we can have lives of luxury. What makes them not human, and what will happen if they decide that being human is just what they want, even if it means their own destruction? But beyond that, there are eerie convocations of class, race, and wealth that seem eerily relevant today: the future L.A. is populated with losers. Those with money and connections – save for the corporate masters who stay behind to manufacture the androids – have left earth for a cushy life in the outer space colonies, while the rabble remain behind. Scott’s masterful imagination of the futuristic city is stunningly evocative: an ethnic mélange, a collision of fashions and cultures, sex and violence around every corner, crooked cops and criminals alike speaking a curious language that is an amalgam of dozens of immigrant voices. The losers live by scrounging, while the winners sit in remote towers above them. The vision of a dystopic futuristic metropolis as imagined by Scott (and Philip K. Dick) was so compelling that Blade Runner later became a founding document of the cyberpunk movement.

SLACKER (1991)

Here's the thing about utopias: your ideal society may not look a whole hell of a lot like mine. Yours may resemble the Garden of Eden, perhaps with a chocolate river running through it, but mine probably looks a lot like Richard Linklater's no-budget 1991 debut Slacker. Here's a magical land full of interesting people, and you don't have to spend more than two minutes with any of them. It's a bohemian crazy quilt of coffee houses, bars, rock clubs and used book stores crammed with conspiracy literature, a laid-back enclave percolating with oddball creativity, where time has no meaning. When I first moved to Austin more than a dozen years ago, hardly a day went by that I didn't run into Ultimate Loser at the Continental Club or Been on the Moon Since the Fifties on the hike and bike trail, and it was almost – but not quite – as if I'd found myself living in the movie. (One of the characters nearly punched me in the eye for hitting on his girlfriend, which is a nice memory to have now, if not so much fun then.) Austin is still a cool place to live, all things considered, but it's changed so much since then that Slacker is almost a relic; you could make a drinking game out of spotting the locations that have since been supplanted by condos or Starbucks. Still, it's nice to know I can still visit that place any time I want just by cueing up the Slacker DVD.

V FOR VENDETTA (2005)

The fascist England of Alan Moore’s graphic novel, upon which the James McTeigue film was based, was a very British affair: tawdry, dirty, steeped in a very 1930s understanding of totalitarianism and suffused with an English sense of racial purity. The film did what such films always do – it took liberties. (Which is why Alan Moore refuses to have anything to do with film adaptations of his work.) Gone was a the filthy, hardscrabble Orwellian vision of a nearby dystopia, triggered by an unexplained nuclear exchange: in its place was a very modern authoritarian state, its parallels to Bush’s America as blaring and obvious as Moore’s references to Thatcher’s England were subtle and quiet. The great dictator is transformed from a hard, driven, religious man to a cartoonish supervillain appearing on giant screens as if he were a James Bond nemesis; his right-hand man is transformed from an advantage-taking careerist to a sneering Dick Cheney type; nuclear conflict becomes terrorism, blacks lose their status as the scapegoat of choice to Muslims; and, in a choice that painfully subverts the intent of the original, the state’s highest crime isn’t oppression, it’s deceit. In the absence of the fascist trappings, and the obvious references to modern society (completely with the recreation of state propaganda with talk-show blathering), the story loses much of its muscle. But the terrorist V remains a powerful symbol, and a memorable scene where police inspector Stephen Rea dispassionately explains, like a man who’s seen it happen a dozen times before, how state authority easily gets out of hand, is a compelling vision of the simple corruption of power.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Ozsploitation! “Razorback” (1984)

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Inspired by the terrific new documentary Not Quite Hollywood, the Screengrab is proud to present Ozsploitation!, our own survey of the golden age of Australian drive-in movies. Pop a tube, throw another shrimp on the barbie and try not to chunder.

Last time we looked at Dark Age, about a giant crocodile on the loose Down Under. This week we’re looking at Razorback, which is about a giant wild boar on the loose Down Under. Totally different thing! I almost felt sorry for the big croc – he just wanted to be left alone. The razorback, on the other hand, just seems like kind of an asshole.

Plotwise, the movie is your basic Jaws in the Outback. It opens with grizzled Jake Cullen (Bill Kerr) watching in dismay as his house is ripped apart and his grandson dragged away by a big ol’ slobbery pig-thing. Shortly thereafter, American activist Beth Winters (Judy Morris) arrives in the tiny town of Granulla to fight for the rights of cute kangaroos. The locals don’t take kindly to her, particularly brothers Dicko and Benny, a near-feral pair who live in an industrial hellhole of a food cannery. When Beth disappears, her husband Carl (Gregory Harrison) sets out to find her, and crosses paths with not only Dicko and Benny, but the hideous hairy bundle of grunts and snorts known as the razorback.

Plot is a secondary consideration at best, however, when it comes to the supremely stylish Razorback, part of the first wave of MTV-influenced movies. I don’t mean “MTV-influenced” in the sense we use the term today, which is generally to disparage the incoherent slice-and-dice editing so many action movies use to simulate actual excitement. Razorback was directed by Russell Mulcahy, who was in on the ground floor of the music video age – indeed, he helmed the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the first video ever aired on MTV, as well as a number of the early Duran Duran videos that put the network on the map.

Mulcahy brings those early ‘80s visuals to the big screen in Razorback, which is something of a candy store for the eyes. A brew of punk/new wave styles, Western motifs and post-Road Warrior junkyard aesthetics filtered through plenty of smoke machines, colored light gels and fisheye lenses, it’s certainly more stylistically adventurous than practically any contemporary American action/horror flick. In the Razorback world, it’s as if a Mad Max-like society exists in present-day Australia (which may have been a little insulting to those who actually lived in the remote Outback, but hell, they probably didn’t have movie theaters anyway). It all looks great (well, the pig may not be top-of-the-line), but it’s a classic case of style-over-substance; in other words, I really didn’t care who got eaten by the big, hairy boar. The lead actor contributes to this problem – it was common in those days for the Aussies to import an American star or two, but who ever went to see a movie because Gregory Harrison was in it? The revenge storyline is overplayed as well. Why is it that Jaws rip-offs never seem to remember that Jaws was not a revenge movie? Those guys in the boat were just doing their jobs, it was nothing personal. Make Jaws a revenge movie and what do you have? Jaws: The Revenge! So how is that a good idea?

Razorback is more fun to look at than it is to watch, if that makes any sense. And it’s even more fun to look at with four Foster’s.

Previously on Ozsploitation!: Dark Age

Take Five: Ride Hard

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Larry Bishop's Hell Ride opens in limited release this week. Advance buzz about the retroriffic biker exploitation flick isn't great, despite the fact that the movie features one of the most mindlessly entertaining trailers of recent years. Still, it's good to see the biker movie, a cultural leftover from the 1960s that has remained with us despite the transition of Harley culture from last refuge of dangerous lowlifes to weekend amusement of the upper middle class, survive in some form or another. For over 40 years, the lone, leather-clad biker on a flipped-back hog or amped-up chopper has been one of Hollywood's most enduring archetypes, used for everything fom a means to instill mindless terror to cheap comedy relief to, all too often, both. If Hell Ride does nothing more than give Michael Madsen a chance to play an all-new variant on his standard violent lowlife character, it will at least keep this archetype alive. Though, given that plenty of aging Tinseltown stars, writers and producers are themselves motorcycle enthusiasts, it's probably not in any immediate danger anyway. While you're waiting for Hell Ride to come to your local theater -- or, more likely, given its dismal advance hype, while you're waiting for it to show up at your local video rental bargain bin -- here's five more biker movies to help you unleash your inner scuzzball.

THE WILD ONE (1953)

Laslo Benedik's teen-menace movie started it all, in more ways than one. Not only was it the first major motion picture to deal with the alleged menace of out-of-countrol outlaw biker gangs (which, a little over ten years later, would developed into a full-blown moral panic, as exquisitely detailed in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels), but it was one of the first movies to present us with the raw sexual charisma and magnetic, brooding talents of young Marlon Brando; it almost single-handedly started the 1950s craze among teen boys for leather jackets; and each gang in the film lent a name to a rock band (Brando's Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Lee Marvin's Beatles). The events of the film -- which is still highly entertaining today, despite literally decades of imitators -- involve the takeover of a small California town by rival gangs of outlaw bikers; based on a story in Harper's (which was itself based on a real-life incident in Hollister, CA in 1947), it also starts a less pleasign tradition: that of ridiculously overstating the biker menace to appeal to your audience. Not only were the events in Hollister terribly mild compared to the dramatization in The Wild One (there was no real violence, and very little vandalism or criminal behavior), but the bikers involved were invited back a number of times over the years until it became something of a local tradition.

EASY RIDER (1969)

By 1969, the myth of the outlaw biker had transmogrified from simple post-WWII recreational activity to mysterious urban legend to full-blown moral panic, and finally, as evidenced in this notorious countercultural masterpiece, a counter-symbol of true freedom and the flight from small-mindedness and oppression in the face of stultifying all-American values. By the time Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson strapped on the helmets and hopped aboard their custom Captain America choppers, they were engaged in full-fledged reverse myth-making, transforming the rebel biker from the sort of dangerous threat to small-town America that Hopper had played a number of times in other, lesser exploitation movies to a vision of the divine fool, the holy innocent who, while he might consume barrels full of psilocybin and acres worth of grass, was in fact all that was good and decent about this country. And then, wouldn't you know it? Some greaseball redneck goes and blows his head off, just to be a dick. While there's certainly qualities to Easy Rider that make it a treat to watch (most especially Nicholson's performance, Laszlo Kovacs' cinematography, and bits of Terry Southern's screenplay), it's very much a product of its time; you may be glad it exists, but you're likely to spend a lot of time wondering exactly what happened back then.

GIMME SHELTER (1970)

Since Hunter Thompson didn't have a film crew with him when he was writing his Hell's Angels book, the Maysles Brothers' masterful documentary about the Rolling Stones' notorious concert at Altamont is likely to remain the definitive treatment of the most infamous of all outlaw biker groups on film. Unsurprisingly, it shows them at their worst but doesn't entirely play fair: while everyone knows the story of how the security at the concert was disastrously handed over to a lot of drunken, rowdy Angels who worked cheap and didn't care whose head they bashed in, and while there's no doubt that their killing of black concertgoer Meredith Hunter was an overreaction (and the racial slurs they deployed against him didn't help their cause one bit), it was only later made clear that the bikers had been right about Hunter: he was, as they'd said, been carry a gun, waving it around recklessly, and behaving in a very suspicious manner. Filmed evidence of this was why Hell's Angel Allen Passaro, who was primarily responsible for Hunter's death, was acquitted of murder. But as with most stories involving outlaw bikers, the truth got muddled and the legend got exaggerated: Altamont became widely known as the exact time and place that the Sixties died, and the Hell's Angels' reputation as lawless maniacs grew deeper and darker.

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

After decades of imitators, parodies, and its own decreasing dividends in terms of sequels, it's hard to remember exactly how exciting the Mad Max movies were when they first came out. Hard, that is, until you sit down and watch one all the way through. Made at a time when Mel Gibson was still an electrifying performer and not a living self-parody, and directed by a George Miller light-years removed from feel-good movies about talking pigs, they still hold up a gold standard for smart, anarchic, terrifyingly high-velocity action movies, and Mad Max 2 -- more commonly known in the U.S. as The Road Warrior -- is the best of them. It's one of the best action movies of all time, and unlike most movies featuring car crashes, postapocalyptic wastelands, and murderous bandits who look like they were once members of Charged G.B.H., it doesn't sacrifice a shred of intelligence while bringing us its heart-stopping thrills. With oil recently clearing $300 a barrel, gas hitting over $4 a gallon, and many people -- both serious economic thinkers and paranoid tool-shed ranters -- considering what a "post-peak oil" world might look like, now is a good time to contemplate a future without gasoline, where deranged biker gangs run amok, and say: actually, that looks kinda cool.

BEYOND THE LAW (1992)

While public interest in outlaw biker gangs started to die out in the 1970s and had almost totally faded by the 1980s, the biker gangs themselves never went away, and even today, a fringe element of the culture is responsible for some fairly heinous drug dealing and the sort of violent turf wars that go with them. In 1982, an Arizona undercover cop infiltrated one such gang in order to bring them down after a particularly brutal drug killing, and Playboy magazine carried his compelling story. Over 10 years later, HBO produced this dramatic action thriller based on Dan Saxon's story, and while it didn't attract a great deal of attention at the time, it has gone on to become a bargain-bin cult classic, thanks largely to its highly realistic depiction of undercover procedures and its unusually literate storytelling. Okay, admittedly, some of the dialogue is a bit hokey, and Charlie Sheen looks absolutley ridiculous in a biker beard and leather vest, but it's a tightly constructed, nasty little thriller that's a lot better than it has any right to be. And hey, who's that playing a violent lowlife? You guessed it: Michael Madsen! How far we've come...

Forget Indy and Rambo: Five Reasons We Want Mad Max Back

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Two action heroes in hibernation since the '80s have recently awoken, claimed their AARP discount cards and gone back to work on the big screen, but a third remains in retirement. We now know there’s still an audience for Rambo and (especially) Indiana Jones, even if their respective returns have been met with a tepid critical reaction. Of course, we already knew that nostalgia is one of the most powerful elements on the periodic table, which would be reason enough for the Powers That Be to bring Mad Max out of cold storage. But after taking another look at The Road Warrior recently, I think our old favorite wanderer of the wasteland has a little more to offer than a rehash of the glory days. Here are five reasons why I’d shell out my hard-earned cash for Mad Max 4.

Relevance. The original trio of Indiana Jones movies were a recreation of the old matinee serials, and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a recreation of the recreation. Rambo is long past his sell-by date as a Cold War avenger, and the attempt at bringing him up to date by involving him in the Burmese genocide was greeted as forced at best and offensive at worst. Now let’s look at the world of Mad Max as seen in The Road Warrior : hmm, desert tribes warring over the last remaining supplies of gasoline? In these days of $4.00 per gallon at the pumps, I think we can work with that. It doesn’t have to be an all-out Iraq allegory, although those overtones would be hard to avoid. Surely we can all relate to the concept of scavenging for fuel. Who among us has not fantasized about hijacking a tanker full of petrol in recent months?

Getting Beyond “Beyond Thunderdome.” The third and so far final Mad Max movie, Beyond Thunderdome had its moments, mainly the beginning and the end – also known as “the parts George Miller directed.” (Miller did the action scenes, turning the rest of the film over to George Ogilvie.) Most Max fans would probably rather forget the plotline involving the lost tribe of children, an overtly Spielbergian turn of events that doesn’t mesh well with the gear-grinding post-apocalyptic vibe of the series. But it’s easy enough to ignore this episode – the continuity between the three films is rough, anyway. A good parallel would be Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy: how about a Mad Max equivalent of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly? Hell, you could bring in two new characters and have Max be “The Ugly,” which brings us to…

The Mel Gibson Factor. Gibson has been conspicuously absent from the screen (as an actor, that is), and with good reason. Given all the controversies of recent years, there may not be many lead characters that audiences would be willing to accept Gibson playing. Because, you know, he’s crazy. So what better role than an aged Max Rockatansky, 20 years further down the road to nowhere? Imagine Gibson with his big ol’ mad prophet beard, more legend than man, the lone remnant of a long-dead civilization no one else believes in anymore. I tell ya, it could work! Rumors of Mad Max 4: Fury Road keep resurfacing, some with Gibson as a participant, some without. I say he’s got to be there, even if he’s not the lead. He could even send up his drunk driving arrest…well, okay, maybe not.

Real Automotive Mayhem. Our own Andrew Osborne covered this in his recent CGI rant: “Why are high speed car chases with actual cars (and trucks and motorcycles and gyrocopters) better than computerized car action? Gee, I don’t know...maybe the same reason sex with an actual human being is better than internet porn?” Naturally, we must insist that CGI be used sparingly in any Mad Max reboot. We want to smell the exhaust pouring off the screen.

No More Penguins. If George Miller gets involved in a new Mad Max movie, it will keep him from making a sequel to Happy Feet. It’s not that we don’t love adorable penguins, but we need a break. Look, I’m not saying a Mad Max sequel is a necessity – none of these revivals are. But this is one action hero’s return I’d greet with more than just a shrug.

CGI Must Die: 5 Reasons Why

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Plastic surgery is a good metaphor for CGI (a.k.a. "computer-generated imagery"): it works best when you’re least aware of it, adding value without calling attention to its glaring, unnatural fakery. A little and you’re marveling at the natural, age-appropriate sexiness of Susan Sarandon, Helen Mirren or Meryl Streep, wondering “did she or didn’t she?” with regard to nips, tucks and nose jobs. Too much, and you’re recoiling in horror at that freakish Cat Lady lady, gasping in shock over missing noses and airbag lips, or wondering why Nicole Kidman keeps wearing that creepy Nicole Kidman mask.

Hollywood has developed an unhealthy addiction to both plastic surgery and CGI, preferring the obviously fake to the convincingly real, whether in the form of grotesquely disproportionate rock-hard breasticles or pixilated atrocities like Speed Racer, the cinematic equivalent of watching other people's birthday brats play video games at Chuck E. Cheese for an endless 135 minutes.

Did Jar-Jar Binks teach us nothing? Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer a little special in my special effects: cinematic images that make me go, “Oh my God, how’d they do that?” rather than, “Dude, that reminds me of this awesome World of Warcraft battle I just posted on YouTube!”

If you’re one of the CGI addicted who think all non-pixelated movie effects are inherently “cheesy,” consider the following clips an intervention as we here at the Screengrab present five examples of amazing movie moments that had (almost) nothing to do with computer-generated imagery.

Just about any Buster Keaton movie

See that car falling apart while Buster Keaton is driving it? See the front of that house falling and nearly crushing him? See that bridge collapsing with the train on it? All that shit actually happened in real life, not in post-production!

The Road Warrior

Why are high speed car chases with actual cars (and trucks and motorcycles and gyrocopters) better than computerized car action? Gee, I don’t know...maybe the same reason sex with an actual human being is better than internet porn?

The Thing (1982)

Sure, the shape-shifting alien action in John Carpenter’s The Thing may look as fake and unbelievable as CGI...but the viscous, tactile ooze has an icky, organic quality that's very hard to duplicate in the shiny world of greenscreen ones and zeroes.

Altered States

CGI scenes all tend to have a similar look, not unlike the legions of aging Hollywood starlets sporting “trout pout” and Spitting Image puppet faces after one too many visits to the neighborhood Botox dispensary. Directors and special effects coordinators forced to get a little more creative, however, may come up with distinctive, fucked-up and memorable images like those found in this one-of-a-kind Ken Russell phantasmagoria.

Star Wars

And speaking of tactile...one word: models. The star destroyer in the opening scene of Star Wars (along with all the nooks and crannies of all the ships in 2001, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien) were and remain more iconic and dramatic than all the CGI pod-racers, Naboo royal cruisers or Trade Federation frigates the computers at Skywalker Ranch have ever rendered.

Don’t get me wrong. CGI has achieved some amazing things: the bullet-time sequences in The Matrix, Gollum and that buck naked Angelina Jolie in Beowulf. But enough is enough, people. It’s time for Hollywood to go cold turkey.

For the betterment of all humanity...CGI Must Die.

Apocalypse Now and Then: Ten Great End-of-the-World Movie Scenarios, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Neil Marshall's new sci-fi action thriller Doomsday, starring the very hard-to-mind-looking-at Rhona Mitra, opens tomorrow. It is but the latest in a long and hallowed tradition of using the controlled, expensive technology of motion pictures to imagine how things will look as our planet, spinning out of control with its resources depleted, chews through its last nerve and prepares to breathe its last. We don't know for sure how the world will really end of course, but one thing's for sure; if the last person who's there to see it has seen the right movies, he's certain to spend his last minutes experiencing a powerful sensation of deja vu.

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

This is actually the second of the three films directed by George Miller and starring Mel Gibson as Mad Max — hence its title outside the United States, Mad Max 2 — but even though it's the one in the middle, it's the one that gets the apocalyptic element just about right. Things are pretty crazy in the original Mad Max, but society hasn't completely flatlined yet. And in Beyond Thunderdome, known to serious film scholars as "the one with Tina Turner", damned if the people don't seem to be having too good a time. (It makes the end of the world look like something that Vince McMahon is staging for a Pay-Per-View.) The Road Warrior gets a real doomsday vibe going by boiling the cutting-edge action movie, circa 1980, down to its essentials: loud motor vehicles, lots of space in which to drive them at high speeds, and plenty of attitude exhibited by people with punk haircuts and Dirty Harry jawlines. It is a hard world where men are men, except for the ones who are more like warthogs who've been hitting the Nautilus machines, and the screenwriter, if he knows what's good for him, isn't getting paid by the spoken word. George Miller has since proven himself to be a director whose talent is varied and many-sided, but he may have had trouble fully shaking this vision off: in his most recent film, Happy Feet, he managed to slip an end-of-days vibe into a story of dancing penguins.

GLEN AND RANDA (1971)

The end of the world as brought to you by hippies. Shaggy-haired Glen (Steve Curry) and Randa (Shelley Plimpton, Martha's mother) are a young couple who have never known civilization; among the last surviving human inhabitants of a world devastated by nuclear war, they have no memory of a pre-apocalyptic world and no knowledge of what has been lost outside of the images Glen sees in some comic books he's scavenged. Childlike and close to nonverbal, they spend their days frisking naked in the grass and among the trees, much as they would if they were rich California trust fund kids before the apocalypse and their parents were out of town for the weekend. They don't even seem to have the instinctive ability to figure out about sex and procreation on their own; after Randa is impregnated by a half-mad old man (Garry Goodrow), Glen, who has led them out on a search to find the wonders he has beheld in his Wonder Woman comic, turns pouty and takes to kicking her in her growing tummy. In the end, Randa dies in childbirth, and Glen sets out to sea in a tiny boat, taking the newborn baby along in case he needs a snack. Glen and Randa had trouble getting released at all, perhaps in part because of its stars' reluctance to put some clothes on, and like some other films by the director Jim McBride, seems to have subsequently vanished from the face of the earth.

BLACK MOON (1975)

The end of the world as brought to you by arty French hippies. Actually, this film was directed by the great Louis Malle, but he was clearly trying to access the counterculture zeitgeist and getting in touch with his inner goofball. Cathryn Harrison, the fifteen-year-old granddaughter of Rex Harrison, is wandering through what's left of the world; she is first seen posing as a man, because, maybe because the women heard about what happened to poor Randa, relations between the sexes have degenerated into a shooting war. She ends up taking refuge in a huge house occupied by Therese Giehse (German), Alexandra Stewart (French Canadian), and Joe Dallesandro (the jury's still out). None of the people talk much, maybe because, given the language barriers, they'd have trouble understanding each other if they did. The cast also includes a rat and a unicorn (which appears to have a glandular condition), both of which do talk; there are also flowers that, when stepped on, whine about it. Shot by Sven Nykvist, Black Moon looks great, thus confirming any suspicions you may have had that the human race will still be able to take pretty pictures even after we've used up our last collective brain cell.

BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970)

Charlton Heston's astronaut character Taylor was already a rather nihilistic fellow in the original Planet of the Apes, but in the first sequel of the series he proves he's not just all talk. First he vanishes for about an hour, shortly after the discovery of the Statue of Liberty that ended the first movie, leaving the main action to a mini-Heston, James Franciscus. (Franciscus's meaningful contributions to the series are few, but we'll always have his incredulous reading of the line "My God — it's a city of apes!") Late in the movie, Franciscus discovers that Taylor is being held captive by a band of underground mutants who worship a doomsday bomb that will, if detonated, destroy the entire planet. The gorilla army descends on the mutant lair and all hell breaks loose, in the course of which poor Franciscus takes a bullet to the head. Having had quite enough of talking apes and telepathic mole-people, Heston unleashes a mighty cry of "You bloody bastards!" and plunges onto the detonator with his dying breath. And you can pry it from his cold, dead hands, if you can find them, which you can't because, indeed, the planet explodes. Or as the abrupt final line of narration has it: "In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead." Hey, thanks for coming to the show, ladies and gentlemen! Drive home safely! It's an ending that provokes laughter in your modern sophisticated audience, much to the bafflement of a gentleman who was sitting behind me at a revival house screening some years ago. "I dunno what everyone's laughing at," he muttered. "It's gonna happen."

LAST NIGHT (1999)

Most movies about apocalypse tie themselves in knots to imagine the unimaginable. They spend millions of dollars on effects and art direction to stage elaborate scenarios of how the world will end, as the filmmakers work out of the question of why. Standing in contrast to films of this kind is Don McKellar's Last Night, a movie with a strictly ground-level approach to an impending apocalypse. In McKellar's world, the end is imminent, and the characters are powerless to stop it, so rather than focusing on the extremes of human behavior, the film attempts to deal more realistically with how characters would spend their final hours on Earth. The tone is set early on when a woman (Sandra Oh) stops at an abandoned grocery store for a bottle of wine, sees two on the shelf, and instead of simply taking both and leaving she carefully chooses one and politely leaves the other for someone else to take. This small gesture says it all — there is looting and rioting in Last Night, but in the face of the unspeakable many people would prefer to end their lives by maintaining all the order and dignity they can. Consider the gas company executive (played by David Cronenberg) who calls all of the company's customers to assure them that the power will stay on until the end. Other people take the end of the world as an opportunity to fulfill their lifelong wishes, from the aspiring pianist who finally gets a gig a hour before the world is scheduled to end to the man who uses it as an excuse to sleep with one of his former teachers. Last Night lacks the visceral thrills of most films about apocalypse, but instead it focuses on the very different reactions people would inevitably have with the end of the world only hours, minutes, even seconds away.

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Click here for Part 2.