Year of Our Exploitation 1979, Part 3: MAD MAX

The final year in the greatest of all decades is rife with cult and grindhouse masterworks. Come along for an exploration of these cinematic mayhem milestones as only McBeardo can provide - because it’s all about the crap I was doing when I saw these movies.

MAD MAX (1979)
Mad Max was made and released in Australia in 1979. The subsequent year, it opened at the Oceana Theater in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. I wasn’t allowed to see it.

But I did marvel at the ad in the newspaper, wondering if its helmet-adorned, jack-booted, armed-in-leather “Maximum Force of the Future” was some kind of super-homo.

Consider the time. Cruising had recently been out, and the rampaging assless-chap-clad chaps overrunning the West Side Highway did not go unnoticed on Youngman McBeardo’s trips into the city from Brooklyn (my family always took the Battery Tunnel back then. It was cheap-ish. And, as noted, what a show!).

Aside from a vague awareness of Mad Max popping around revival houses like the Thalia for a while, my next real exposure to the movie came on Easter Sunday 1982, when Cult Movies by Danny Peary arrived in my goody basket (1979’s haul proved to be no slouch itself as I scooped Labour of Lust by Nick Lowe out from the plastic green grass).

Peary’s impact on the budding cinemaniac McBeardo cannot be underestimated. I could write a book about his books. And one of the titles Peary waxed about most captivatingly in Cult Movies was Mad Max.

Cult Movies‘ disclosure that the bikers kill Mad Max’s baby wigged me out a little - I can’t stomach violence against children now, so back when I was one, forget it - but I’d already survived and processed Peary’s write-up of Andy Warhol’s Bad (1977), complete with a publicity shot of a junkie mom preparing to toss her adorable infant out a window.

All I could do was figure that someday, probably on channel 9 at 3am, I’d catch up with Mad Max. Then The Road Warrior conquered the world not long after I wore through my first copy of Cult Movies.

I could not wait to see it. But, of course, being 13, I had to do just that.

First off, The Road Warrior came from Australia and, movie-wise, in the early 1980s, Australia was what France was in the ’60s and Hong Kong in the ’90s: the main source of high-profile arthouse product (cases in points: Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, Starstruck). Paul Hogan put a right end to that just past the halfway point of the decade, though, dih’nee, mate?

This tangential glaze of pretentiousness added immeasurably to The Road Warrior’s appeal in my about-to-enter-high-school (self-)consciousness.

Then there were the movie’s garbage-dump fashions and Mohawk hair-dos, which meant punk-rock, which I was heavily into endorsing at the time.

Due to The Uncle Floyd Show and Rock-N-Roll High School, I owned a few Ramones albums but, in honesty, mostly I listened to the Beatles and whatever was on the radio (which definitely included American Top 40 and Dr. Demento).

But I wanted to be on punk’s side.

Then, too, The Road Warrior exuded some weird and powerful kinky sex vibe - there looked to be women scattered about the movie’s wasteland, which meant that it probably wasn’t just super-homo - and I wanted in on that, as well. And forever.

I finally got to see The Road Warrior on Columbus Day weekend with my friend Paul at the famous Colonial Theater in swanky Keansburg, New Jersey. It was on a double-bill with comedy Night Shift (1982) starring Henry Winkler and Michael Keaton as pimps running a hooker-ring during the graveyard shift in a New York City morgue. That movie is quite hilarious and somehow, inexplicably, heart-warming and even wholesome.

Road Warrior, as I most likely don’t even have to write, surpassed even my most ass-stompingest expectations and, coupled with Conan the Barbarian (1982) from earlier that same summer, provided me with codes of honor and conduct that I have lived by ever since - nothing good, mind you, like “take care of your body”, “be loyal to your friends”, or “do the things you say you’re going to do”, just stuff like “hold a psychotic grudge for years,” “the best solution is the most spectacularly vicious solution”, and “it’s not your personal victory that counts, it’s the ongoing and even more intensely personal humiliation of the a-hole you beat for it.”

In the early days of VHS, my taped-from-Paul’s-grandmother’s-HBO copy of The Road Warrior served as constant viewing, even though the original Mad Max remained elusive.

That is until June 1983, when it got a wide re-release in New York City.

School had just gotten out but, in my case, not for long, as I finished 204 in Xavier High School’s freshman class of 253, thank you very much.

I’d be suffering through my second of three consecutive summer make-up sessions in short order. Those were the times, eh?

Christ knows how I got my parents, who were understandably infuriated by my final report card (I believe I received the lowest allowable numeric grade in math: 55, thank you very much), to allow me to go see Return of the Jedi (1983). But I did.

Perhaps it was enough that I didn’t get tossed out of Xavier straight-up which, for every moment of the four years I went there, loomed as a likelihood (I really should pay Moms and Pops McBeardo back all that wasted tuition).

My academic goal, from kindergarten onward, was to exert the absolute bare effort necessary to maintain a D-minus average and avoid expulsion. It worked until my third semester of college.

Anyway, my sort-of cousin Kenny and I ventured to the Kingsway Multiplex to see Return of the Jedi (at the obscenely jacked-up ticket price of $5.50), and we both thought it was kind of on the sucky side, but we consoled ourselves to sneaking downstairs into the reissued, dubbed version of Mad Max.

And it was awesome, as you know, albeit less so than The Road Warrior (although the sub-giallo dubbing surely played a part in that). I mean, one has The Lord Humongous (”The Ayatollah of Rock-n-Rolla!”) and the Feral Kid, and the other doesn’t.

Still, it was Mad Max and it spawned dozens, if not hundreds, of my favorite trash movies throughout the ’80s - especially when they were combined with Conan rip-offs.

1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982), 2020: Texas Gladiators (1982), Escape 2000 (1982), She (1982), Warriors of the Wasteland (1982), After the Fall of New York (1983), Conquest (1983), Stryker (1983), Survival Zone (1983), Def-Con 4 (1985), Wheels of Fire (1985), Dead-End Drive In (1986), Roller Blade (1986), She-Wolves of the Wasteland(1987), World Gone Wild (1988), The Blood of Heroes (1989) … even Café Flesh (1982)!

And then there is, of course, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), which is mighty and mind-blowing in its own right, particular in the face of its unfortunate PG-13 rating.

These post-apocalyptic blow-outs, one and all, are testaments to live by - for as long as you can stand it, or until they drop the big one.

Whichever comes hardest.

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• « Year of Our Exploitation 1979, Part 2: Hardcore
• » Linksploitation: October 9, 2009

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