So obviously it’s the roads.  The hot, flat, never-ending roads, the cars and the bikes and the carnage.  This is why you keep going back to the first two Mad Max movies and their low-down, widescreen, undercranked mayhem.

Away from the tarmac, what you remember as soon as you start watching is just how off-kilter these films are.  There’s an underlying crazy to proceedings that seeps out of every frame and performance and in the middle of it all is Mel Gibson looking like a man who is trying to hold it all together, as if he can’t quite comprehend what director George Miller is up to or where Hugh Keays-Byrne’s performance as the Toecutter will go next.  Perhaps he’s just puzzled about what happened between movies to move the setting so quickly from ‘world winding down’ to ‘s&m petrol wars’.

Highly Recommended.

..although I now feel compelled to revisit Bartertown, which, well, you know.