![]() ![]() It didn’t matter that the movie featured gorgeous aesthetics and hugely impressive action set-pieces. Box office returns of $264,000,000 were considered a huge disappointment for a movie that cost somewhere in the region of $175,000,000, killing the mainstream career of director Kevin Reynolds and plunging Oscar-winning megastar Costner into frosty commercial waters. Starring Kevin Costner as a Maxian loner who fit a very familiar profile, Waterworld was written off, somewhat unfairly, as Mad Max on water, thanks to a thinly veiled, like-for-like premise and a cast of characters who looked like they’d jet skied their way off the set of The Road Warrior. Perhaps the most famous example of a Mad Max derivative happened to be the most expensive movie ever made back in 1995. Mad Max wannabees weren’t restricted to the B-movie doldrums. A young Patrick Swayze even tried Max on for size in 1987’s Steel Dawn, the same year Roddy Piper starred in the Miller-influenced, post-apocalyptic sci-fi comedy Hell Comes to Frogtown. In the US, low-budget opportunists Charles Band and Golan-Globus jumped on the Mad Max bandwagon with movies such as Metal Storm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983) and Jean-Claude Van Damme action vehicle Cyborg (1989). Aussie neighbours New Zealand gave us the rather familiar Battle Truck (1982), the title of which should tell you all you need to know about that particular movie. The film’s Ozploitation roots provided the perfect platform for Italian genre cinema, scuzzy efforts 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982), Escape from the Bronx (1983), and The New Barbarians (1983) straight out of the Mad Max playbook. All you needed was a desolate landscape, a few broken-down vehicles and some rag-tag outfits and you could pass yourself off as one of the most imitated movies of its generation, of any generation, at least until someone yelled “Action!” There was even a hugely popular pro wrestling tag team named the Road Warriors who dressed and acted exactly like the movie’s twisted metal villains, their name of course lifted from the film’s alternate title The Road Warrior, a supremely cool moniker created for American audiences who weren’t familiar with the original movie’s limited release.Ī slew of bargain-basement impostors crawled out of the nuclear dust in the wake of Mad Max 2‘s success, chiefly because, as proven by 1979’s hyper low-budget Mad Max, the concept could be done on the cheap. There were countless toy ranges and video games based on Miller’s creation. ![]() Even today George Miller’s ravaged vision of society is prevalent throughout the sci-fi genre, particularly its innovative world building and costume design. You only have to look at what preceded it and what followed to understand its influence. Not only is Mad Max 2 a perfect movie, it’s one of the most influential dystopian films ever made, becoming the standard bearer for not only action sequels, but action movies in general. Meet Max, “the Road Warrior” Max, in George Miller’s hugely innovative action sequel ![]()
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