Product Description

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 of a 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 for -- revenge!Special Features:New Digitally Remastered Anamorphic TransferNew-To-The-U.S.! Original Australian LanguageOriginal Mono Audio Track Mel Gibson: The Birth Of A Star Documentary Mad Max: The Film Phenomenon DocumentaryTheatrical TrailersAudio Commentary With Jon Dowding David Eggby Chris Murray & Tim Ridge Road Rants Trivia & Fun Fact TrackPhoto GalleryTV SpotsAnd More!System Requirements: Running Time 94 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE Rating: R UPC: 027616869241 Manufacturer No: 1002726

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2647 in DVD
• Brand: MAD MAX (SPECIAL EDITION) (DVD MOVIE)
• Released on: 2002-01-01
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds
• Running time: 94 minutes

Amazon.com
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

DVD features
MGM's special edition restores the original Australian soundtrack (including Mel Gibson's voice!) to the film for the first time on home video. That in itself would be enough to make this a DVD essential, but cinematographer David Eggby, special effects supervisor Chris Murray, and art director Jon Dowding look under the hood of this revved-up revenge classic in a commentary track and the featurette "Mad Max: The Film Phenomenon." Their nuts-and-bolts comments and nostalgic stories of seat-of-the-pants stunts provide a terrific survey of low-budget action moviemaking by ambitious young filmmakers. Less essential is the rather wan Mel Gibson star portrait (apparently Gibson and director George Miller were too busy to participate in the supplements, so we make do with his acting teacher and costars) and the entertaining, if truly trivial, "Road Rants" subtitle track. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

Brutal and compelling
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.

"Mad Max" stays to this day a striking, desolate, and memorable piece of cinema...
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...

Mad Mel Max Gibson
This movie is simply Meltastic and if you like Mr. Gibson at all...YOU MUST OWN THIS MOVIE!!!