Most of this exciting Australian film’s small budget obviously went to the amazing car and motorcycle stunts, and then the producers spent about twenty bucks on everything else. Cars explode, motorcycles flip over, vehicles collide, and stunt men get knocked around by flying wreckage while you wonder how they walked away from it. It’s great stuff. There’s a music score here, but this film’s REAL score is the sound of rumbling engines.
The setting is a post-apocalyptic world, but you can just barely tell. It’s trashy and barren, but so was my old neighborhood in Dallas. Nobody in the film ever even MENTIONS the apocalypse, so this feels a lot more like a modern western than science fiction. As in a western there are lawmen, such as Mel Gibson’s Max Rockatansky, but it’s the bad guys who seem to be in charge. The bad guys here are a punk-haired motorcycle gang out robbin’, rapin’, killin’, and terrorizin’ the six or seven people we see out and about.
This was Mel Gibson’s first big movie. It was an international hit, but only a modest success in the USA, where American International Pictures dubbed a new soundtrack on top with American actors because they were worried that people wouldn’t like the Australian accents.