This DVD item from MGM (Video & DVD) was reviewed on 11-Dec-2008.
Mad Max (Special Edition) Reference DVD. Classifications : General Action & Adventure Genres DVD Video Mel Gibson Action Stars Action & Adventure Genres DVD Video Biker Films By Theme Action & Adventure Genres DVD Video Chase Movies By Theme Action & Adventur . Click the following link to view the cover of Mad Max (Special Edition). Related topics: 1979. General. Action & Adventure. Genres. DVD. Video. Mel Gibson. Action Stars. Action & Adventure. Genres. DVD. requestid: de2967c7-e6c8-4447-bbc8-31658b390f7e
requestprocessingtime: 0.0621550000000000
salesrank: 2580
numberofitems: 1
packagedimensions: 5075025540
1) DVD DVD Mad Max (Special Edition) by MGM (Video & DVD). April 12, 2009 will mark the 30th anniversary of the Australian release of this film, which was later released in the US during the summer of 1980. Being nine years wiser since my original review posting to this website, I still can´t understand why some one (perhaps George Miller himself) doesn´t produce an uncut, definitive version of this film on DVD. However, since we´re talking about a 30 year old film, personal priorities and what´s happening in the world itself, perhaps there´s no interest anymore in classic cult cinema. I sit here typing this message today while watching my DVD version of the film knowing that filmmakers are bound by certain rules when putting stories to film. However, one can hope and dream...can´t they. Here´s a hyperlink to a website that speaks to those cut scences I told about in my original 1999 posting: http://www.madmaxmovies.com/making/madmax/CutScenes/index.html. I´m reminded of the monologue at the beginning The Road Warrior...´my life fades, the vision dims...´¤ 2) DVD DVD Mad Max (Special Edition) by MGM (Video & DVD). Mad Max is one of the best post-apocolyptic films of all time, exceeded only by a few films, including it´s own sequel (The Road Warrior or Mad Max 2, depending on where you´re from). Full of great stunts and plenty of action, this film influences to this day. This vesion includes a few extras which you will enjoy if you are a fan of the series.¤ 3) DVD DVD Mad Max (Special Edition) by MGM (Video & DVD). Max Max is an ugly, bare knuckle movie that shuns sentimentality and explanation. Set in a dystopian future (not really post apocalyptic as many reviews claim - there is no evidence of a humanitarian crisis preceding the action), it features a wild and desolate Australian outback with feral kill hungry violent gangs of motorcycles taking on a quirky, underfunded police force. Max, played by Mel Gibson, is an old fashioned road to calvary type hero. A police officer who becomes disillusioned after the savage burning of one of his colleagues, he quits, but finds the gang have not left him. In horrific scenes, the gang hunts down his family, and Gibson returns to extract revenge, a necessarily determined and scarred loner.
Max Max does not stretch out into many dimensions, but it contains a raw savage power and exposes something of the nub of the innate violence at the heart of man. A good one to watch in the line of movies that expose the raw seam below the surface of our civilization.¤ 4) DVD DVD Mad Max (Special Edition) by MGM (Video & DVD). In spite of the fact that the 1981 film The Road Warrior--the second influential cinematic work of writer/director George Miller´s Dystopian vision of the near future trilogy--leads to receive the anti-hero Max, released two years earlier, is where it all started... For it was here that Miller first brought to the screen his hellish vision, where civil society is under siege by crime and disorder, with the strength and charisma of a new young, tough, good looking actor by the name of Mel Gibson...
Gibson was just 23 years old when he took the role of Max Rockatansky--a young hotshot cop so emotionally wounded--and was such an unknown star that when the film was hitting the screens in the States, the preview trailers didn´t even mentioned him but instead focused on the movie´s coolest and most original car action ever filmed... In retrospect, of course, Gibson´s portrayal of a relentless vigilante is an essential element of the picture...
In the Australian outback, Rockatansky is a motorcycle cop trying to keep order in a quickly disintegrating society... Vicious lawless bikers and road-raging psychopaths race up and down the forbidden territories, raping and pillaging the peaceful towns, and one such bunch ends up at the door of Max´s wife (Joanne Samuel), and their 2-year old son... When they are both lying dead in middle of the road, Max is all driven over the edge, and so starts a high-speed pursuit involving wild rides, chilling fights, and memorable fast-motion suspenseful scenes rarely equaled in cinema...
¤ 5) DVD DVD Mad Max (Special Edition) by MGM (Video & DVD). This movie is simply Meltastic and if you like Mr. Gibson at all...YOU MUST OWN THIS MOVIE!!!
¤ 6) DVD DVD Mad Max (Special Edition) by MGM (Video & DVD). Setting Mel Gibson on a sure path to superstardom, this highly acclaimed "crazy collide-o-scope"(Newsweek) of highway mayhem "cinematically defined the postapocalyptic landscape" (TV Guide). Featuring eye-popping stunts that are "electrifying and very convincing" (Variety) and "an authentically nihilistic spirit" (The Village Voice), Mad Max is "pure cinematic poetry" (Time). In the ravaged near future, a savage motorcycle gang rules the road. Terrorizing innocent civilians while tearing up the streets, the ruthless gang laughs in the face ofa police force hell-bent on stopping them. But they underestimate one officer: Max Rockatansky (Gibson). And when the bikers brutalize Max´s best friend and family, they send him into a mad frenzy that leaves him with only one thing left in the world to live forrevenge!¤ 7) DVD DVD Mad Max (Special Edition) by MGM (Video & DVD). The Road Warrior is already a classic, sans condescending genre distinctions like "sci-fi" or "action." But the story of Mel Gibson´s stately antihero begins in Mad Max, George Miller´s low-budget debut in which Max is a "Bronze" (cop) in an unspecified postapocalyptic future with a buddy-partner and family. But unlike most films set in the devastated future, Mad Max is especially notable because it is poised between our industrialized world and total regression to medieval conditions. The scale tips towards disintegration when the Glory Riders burn into town on their bikes like an overamped cadre of Brando´s Wild Ones. Representing the active chaos that will eventually overwhelm the dying vestiges of civil society, they take everything dear to Max, who will exact due revenge. His flight into the same wilds that created the villains artfully sets up the morally ambiguous character of the subsequent films. --Alan E. Rapp¤ Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 8-Jan-2009, 0792851846027616869241, 420-320-866-7OB-S5B-ISB-GSB-8 
Mad Max (Special Edition), DVD, Image © MGM (Video & DVD)
|
