Retro Review: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

 So there's some kind of Mad Max movie coming out this weekend, but I heard it sucks so there's no point in talking about that, right? Why waste time talking about some dumb reboot when we can discuss the true highlight of George Miller's post-apocalyptic saga, the only one to have earned its own dedicated Mystery Science Theater 3000 joke? Of course, I'm talking about Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and all joking aside, I do actually like it. I know that Thunderdome is the "black sheep" of the Mad Max movies, if only because most people have only seen Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior) and / or forget that Mad Max 1 (Mad Max) is nothing like its sequels, vehicular mayhem aside. That's okay, because they're kind of right to think that Thunderdome is not as good as The Road Warrior, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have its charms. As long as those charms don't involve the term "Captain Walker".

 There's significantly less vehicular mayhem on display for most of Beyond Thunderdome, starting with the fact that Max (Mel Gibson) is riding on a camel-drawn truck, which he quickly loses to Jedediah (Bruce Spence), who is not the gyro-copter pilot from The Road Warrior* but is another pilot who has a son (Adam Cockburn). We don't even know it's Max right away, but I mean, who else is the movie going to start with? Max has scraggly, long hair, and one of his eyes is a different color after the crash Wez (Vernon Miller) caused in the last movie, but it's still him. He's understandably not pleased that someone knocked him off of his vehicle and took it, so he follows the trail of detritus to Barter Town. If you meet somebody who will admit to liking Thunderdome (as I do), this section of the film is probably their favorite part. It is for me, but that's because I'm a sucker for world-building in post-apocalyptic cinema, and Barter Town is a great example of how humanity reforms itself after collapse.

 Max has to enter with the rabble, because who is he? Nobody. No one in Barter Town cares that he used to be a cop or that he saved a whole community and smuggled out their gasoline from Lord Humungus (Kjell Nilsson) that one time. Those stories don't get passed around until the Feral Kid (Emil Minty) grows up, anyway. To Barter Town, he's just some dude who walked in, just like everybody else. He doesn't have anything worth trading with The Collector (Frank Thring) at the gate, so he has to be a little more, shall we say, persuasive, but you still have to turn in your weapons or get lost. You can keep the flyswatter, I guess. The pilot has to be here somewhere, so Max has one hour to find him. Instead, he meets Aunty (Tina Turner)**, and her goons.

 Aunty likes Max's moxie, and when he dispatches some goons with the knife hidden inside his flyswatter, she's even more impressed. Like Max, Aunty was someone else before, and she senses that he's resilient, and adaptable. Mostly that he's dangerous, which is good, because Aunty has a problem. She likes to think she runs Barter Town, but there's a bit of a power struggle. See, in order to keep the power running, she needs the generator to keep running, and only Master (Angelo Rositto) knows how to keep the pig shit / methane production going underground. Master's a diminutive fellow, but that's why he has Blaster (Paul Larsson) as his muscle. As long as Master Blaster is a unit, Aunty doesn't really run Barter Town. Master runs Barter Town, and if he feels he's being slighted, he cuts the power off to prove it.

 The way that Master and Blaster are introduced leans heavily on presenting them as antagonists, even though there's clearly something about Aunty that's not to be trusted. Max goes down to Underworld, where Master runs everything, in order to learn more about Blaster. If he can defeat him in combat, everything the pilot stole will be returned to him, plus methane. Of course, once he's down there, it becomes clear who has his truck: Master. Max rigged it to explode, so any attempts to repair it have been thwarted. Master draws a hard line with Max, but in the process reveals Blaster has a weakness: high pitched sounds, including a penny whistle that Max has been carrying around. Max takes Aunty's offer and we're off to Thunderdome. Two men enter. One man leaves.

 It goes without saying that the Thunderdome portion is the best part of the movie, not only because it's an inventive, exciting action sequence, but also because it has some of the best examples of world-building in the film. Aunty keeps the citizens and criminals of Barter Town in line by giving them gladiatorial-like combat, provided in a dome they can hang onto. She also gives them easy to remember catchphrases to keep them invested: "Two men enter. One man leaves." "You break the deal, you spin the wheel." Nobody watching Max fighting Blaster seems to know or care about the stakes, and it's not necessarily clear that anyone cares who really runs Barter Town. There's a fight in Thunderdome, and Blaster is the reigning champ. There is, of course, another twist, one that we find out at the same time Max does, that almost immediately reverses our sympathies towards the otherwise loathsome Master. Aunty gets what she wants, even when Max "breaks the deal," and he has to "spin the wheel". Luckily for Max, he lands on "Gulag". It may not be so lucky for us.

 So Aunty ships off Max, on the back of a horse with a paper mache mask, into the desert, thus exiting the "Barter Town" section of the film. Unfortunately, it ushers in the "Never, Neverland" portion of Beyond Thunderdome, which feels like it belongs in a different movie. Mostly because it does: the original concept, prior to being appropriated into a Mad Max film, was about a group of children left alone in the post-apocalypse, who form their own Peter Pan-esque society. It turns out that when you drop Max into the equation, that doesn't harmonize as well as one might think. I'm not opposed to juxtaposing the hardened Max Rockatansky with innocent children, many of whom seem to have completely forgotten about the plane crash they survived (and almost everything else), but the mid-section of Beyond Thunderdome grinds whatever narrative progress there was to a halt. Okay, the children think he's "Captain Walker," the pilot of the plane they crashed in who left to get help. Only he's not, and they figure that out, but decide they can still find the "Tomorrow-Morrow Land" Captain Walker promised them, so he reluctantly follows them back into the desert. I wonder where they'll end up?

 In the defense of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, things do pick up when they decide to rescue Master and escape using the locomotive he lives in, with the help of Jebediah and son. The chase scene is largely what Miller directed (George Ogilvie handled the rest of the movie), and it's reminiscent of some of the better moments in Mad Max and The Road Warrior, even if the comically un-killable Ironbar (Angry Anderson) eats up much of the screen time. The ending is surprisingly reminiscent of The Road Warrior, substituting Savannah (Helen Buday) for the Feral Child, as Max once again becomes a story of a budding society. Epilogue aside, I do appreciate the last scene between Max and Aunty, when she and her gang have him dead to rights, having once again separated from the others in an act of sacrifice. There's no reason she shouldn't kill him, having functionally ruined Barter Town and costing her Master, but she just laughs and lets Max go. There's the grudging respect between two survivors we saw early in the film, and after everything goes to hell, what's the point in killing him? We don't need another hero. He's alone in the desert, and she's going back to Barter Town. Let the chips fall where they may.

  To be honest with you, despite being a studio mandated "American" presence for this Mad Max sequel, I really like Tina Turner as Aunty. There's a lot about this movie that seems kind of like a watered down version of Mad Max, but Turner seems really invested in playing this ridiculous character with her ridiculous haircut. She's an equal onscreen with the not quite Lethal Weapon-level famous Gibson (one could argue that Tina Turner was a bigger star than Mel Gibson in 1985), and even though he destroys everything she built, something tells me that Aunty will be all right. She'll set up shop again, re-open Thunderdome, and Barter Town will be back. Meanwhile, Max will roam the wasteland, hopefully not running into more kids. I guess maybe the brides of  Immortan Joe or Toecutter or whatever he's calling himself. Max will get his Interceptor back and somehow be younger or something. You know, reboot crap.

 I mean, if we're being honest here, there's no way that Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome isn't a better movie than Mad Max: Fury Road. Even with the stupid kids. No chance I could eat crow or something like that. Happy 30th, Thunderdome. You might not be everybody's favorite Mad Max movie - or anybody's - but you're good enough for me.




* Or maybe it is. It depends on what story you hear or what person is citing George Miller at what point. A similar problem exists when you try to figure out whether Mad Max: Fury Road is a reboot or whether it fits somewhere between The Road Warrior and Thunderdome, or after Thunderdome, because over the last five years, Miller has vacillated a bit about that. Although the current position is that it's a reboot. A terrible, no good, nobody likes it, reboot.

** I know the credits say "Aunty Entity," but I challenge you to find me any point in the movie where someone says the word "Entity" in relation to her. Hell, Max only says his name one, and that's to Master.

Bad Movie Night Recap (Part One)

 A big chunk of my time away from the ABCs of Movie Masochism has been putting together a feat of REAL movie masochism. I haven't had a proper "Bad Movie Night" in several years, but the basic idea is to put together some of the best of the worst, get some nearest and dearest to come over, and subject them to an all day marathon of movies you would never choose to watch of your own volition.

Sometimes I've been known to cheat - the first Bad Movie Night began with a "field trip" to see Crank 2: High Voltage, but we immediately followed it up with The Giant Claw. Perhaps you've read about The Giant Claw somewhere on this blog. The following day we watched Batman and Robin, Mac and Me, Troll 2, Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, and the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special. So, uh, the bright spot was clearly the worst subtitles ever on the super-violent Riki-Oh. And I like The Story of Ricky.

 Actually, I like The Giant Claw too, and in some twisted way, anything else that makes it into Bad Movie Night. On some level you have to be able to enjoy these movies, or there's no point in watching them. The trick to why Ed Wood movies and Mystery Science Theater 3000 are so successful isn't that the movies are bad and easy to make fun of - it's that the films are charmingly dumb in their own right. There are plenty of terrible movies I'd never show because we'd all be bored and grow angry at the movie, like when we tried to watch the remake of The Wicker Man at Summer Fest, or any time I've tried to get through The Room.

 With that in mind, I had to program this year's Bad Movie Night with schlock that had gaping plot holes, unfortunate sidekicks, gratudity, and wooden line delivery. Would you like a brief run down of eleven hours worth of terrible decisions? Let's look at the first half of the "night"...

 We started with She Devil, which is not the Roseanne movie but a much better (relatively speaking) film from 1958 about the dangers of tinkering in God's domain. Scientist Dr. Scott and his benefactor physician Dr. Bach live together in Stately Wayne manor like an alternate version of The Dark Knight Returns starring Adam West and Burt Ward. Anyway, Dr. Scott has been experimenting with fruit fly serum to cure well, all diseases. It worked on mice, a rabbit, a cat, a dog, and a cheetah. Well, the cheetah looks suspiciously like a panther, but they work that into the plot.

 Dr. Scott talks Dr. Bach into letting him try the serum out on a woman dying of tuberculosis, and it turns her into Wolverine. Well, Wolverine minus the claws but with the ability to change her hair color at will, which comes in handy because her newfound lease on life comes with the desire to kill people for no good reason. Despite being literally the only other people on Earth who know what this "She Devil" can do, our intrepid men of science can't put two and two together for most of the movie, but it doesn't stop Dr. Scott from hooking up with her (in front of the panther!).

 She Devil is filled with "SCIENCE!" in the best possible way, a rambling, semi-coherent plot, and the most improbable car crash you'll ever see, unless you normally see cars driving backwards over cliffs. From the era where all you needed was a "science"-y gimmick to sell a B-Movie, She Devil is exactly the way to start something like this.

 After that, because bad acting and incomprehensibility aren't unique byproducts of the 1950s, we watched 1987's Hard Ticket to Hawaii, from skin flick auteur Andy Sidaris. If you didn't frequent USA Up All Night or late night Skinemax, I guess there's a chance you missed out on Picasso Trigger or Return to Savage Beach, but Sidaris specialized in pointless nudity, an over-abundance of plot threads, and truly bizarre plot twists.

 I could give you the breakdown of what happens in this film that involves two Playboy Playmates / DEA agents / Travel Guides / Witness Protection Program members / Super Spies, but it would take up the rest of the post. It involves diamonds, espionage, drug dealers, remote controlled helicopters, not knowing how to use nunchucks, a quad-rocket launcher, and a "contaminated" snake that ate "cancer infested rats" and is loose on the island. Also a sportscaster with four names (Jimmy John Jim something or other) that ended up being the bad guy in a movie we watched later, a transvestite bartender, and a quad-rocket launcher. Oh, and a guy doing skateboard tricks with a blow up doll.

 And that's the truth. For the highlights, watch Red Letter Media's breakdown of Hard Ticket to Hawaii.


After pointless nudity and excessive plot, it was time for the "kids movie" portion of Bad Movie Night, and I selected a movie I'd never heard of, A Gnome Named Gnorm. It turns out there's a VERY good reason I'd never heard of it before, despite a cast of well known actors and a director that any fan of sci-fi and horror will recognize by name: Stan Winston.

 Yes, the Stan Winston that designed the Predator, the Terminator, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, as well as The Monster Squad, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Galaxy Quest, the Penguin in Batman Returns... yeah. The same one you thought I couldn't possibly be talking about. A Gnome Named Gnorm wasn't his first film - it turns out Pumpkinhead was - but it was the last full length feature he directed, and now I know why.

 A Gnome Named Gnorm (or Upworld) is... uh... well, it's a "buddy cop" movie starring Anthony Michael Hall and a partially animatronic gnome that's the creepiest goddamned thing you'll ever see. It's as though Winston saw The Dark Crystal and thought, "I could make a Gelfling look more realistic" and nobody told him what a horrible idea that would be. Because it is. The first fifteen or so minutes spent with Detective Gallagher (Hall) and Gnorm are cringe-inducing because of how creepy that thing is.

 Now, I'm no expert on children's movies, but I did grow up in the 1980s so I saw a LOT of movies with dumb kid humor. Mac and Me may well be a 90 minute commercial for McDonald's and Coca-Cola, but it knows its target audience and goes for the saccharine plot at every opportunity. A Gnome Named Gnorm can't possibly be for children, but I don't know who the hell would want to watch it, even in 1990.

 To wit: the film begins with an undercover sting operation involving a drug lord name Zadar (not played by Robert Z'Dar, although the Maniac Cop himself IS in the film*)  where Hall ends up being knocked out and the other cop is BLOWN UP in a playground. In fact, Gallagher is only interested in Gnorm because he's a MATERIAL WITNESS TO MURDER. Seriously. All the crap about Gnorm and the "lumen" that people keep stealing or the fact THAT HE'S A GNOME doesn't seem to factor into most of the story. Nobody seems to notice or at the very least care that Gnorm isn't human.  For a while I was convinced that Hall's character was insane and that Gnorm didn't really exist.

 But he does and there's a lot of wrangling between Gallagher's old partner (Claudia Christian) and his chief (Jerry Orbach) and his new partner (Mark Harelik) who Gnorm somehow gets to strip naked before the gnome makes his escape (I must have looked away because I honestly don't know how that happened). There are more murders, a car chase involving a hearse (with full funeral procession behind it) a good samaritan trying to revive the corpse, crotch biting, implied sexual favors, hooks up the sphincter, and a fist fight that wouldn't be out of place in A Christmas Story.

 You know - for kids!

 It's worth mentioning that the plot is coherent enough that Blogorium regular Cranpire was thanking A Gnome Named Gnorm for at least making sense after the last two movies. But then it was time to hit them with the whammy bar...

 Join me tomorrow for the second half of Cap'n Howdy's Bad Movie Night. It only gets better... well, depending on how you look at things.



 * Okay, not AS the Maniac Cop, but considering where this movie goes, it honestly wouldn't be THAT surprising.

"C" is for Critters 3

 I don't think I've ever seen Critters 3, and it's been a long time since I saw Critters or Critters 2. I definitely never saw Critters 4 based on the way that this movie ends, although since it ends with a "To Be Continued..." I might have to suck it up and finish off the series.

 This sure was a different movie than I remembered the Critters films being, so I went back and checked the first two movies. See, I remember them being sorta sci-fi / horror blends with a little bit of goofy comedy, but I didn't really remember there being subtitles that explained what the critters were saying to each other (there sure were) or that the tone was so kid-friendly (although the protagonists are definitely pre-teens in Critters and Critters 2). Sure enough, when I looked they're all rated PG-13, so maybe I'm remembering them being more violent than they were.

 Either way, Critters 3 is pretty fun but it's hard to argue that it isn't a dumb movie for kids for most of its 86 minutes. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing, but I definitely wasn't expecting some of the goofy shenanigans on display in this here movie. You know, the second sequel to Critters. Oh, who am I kidding?

 Critters 3 starts out in much the same way that O Brother Where Art Thou? does not, with some cheesy synthesizer music and a cartoony title font that let's you know this here is going to be some goofy shit, but then Clifford (John Calvin) and his kids Annie (Aimee Brooks) and Johnny (Christian and Joseph Cousins) are driving along singing "Big Rock Candy Mountain." I didn't see that coming, but I bet the Coen brothers did. It probably inspired them. Yup, I'm sticking with that.

 Clifford is on his way back from vacation with Annie and Johnny when they run over some firecrackers* and the tire blows out. They have to pull into an RV camp, where Johnny goes to throw his frisbee and almost goes over a steep incline. He's saved by Josh (Django Unchained's Leonardo DiCaprio), another kid hanging out with his mother (Nina Axelrod) and asshole stepfather (William Dennis Hunt), and said asshole stepfather feels the need to be all rich and obnoxious to Clifford while he changes his tire.

 The kids eventually do throw the frisbee off of the incline (technically, it's Leo's fault) and they run into this crazy survivalist named Charlie (Don Opper), who if I had remembered Critters 1 or 2 well enough I would have recognized as the nerdy guy who becomes apprentice intergalactic bounty hunter. Fortunately for me and all of the kids in the audience circa 1991, Charlie explains what happened in the first two movies, complete with flashback footage to jog our memories. It's also done in this obviously "kiddie" tone that's hard to explain unless you're watching it, but think of how everybody acts or is treated in Mac and Me and you'll have a pretty good idea. That's when I realized that this was not going to be a horror movie.

 Of course, Critters 3 decided to trick me when the family leaves the RV park and we jump ahead to the apartment complex they normally live in. We meet the sleazeball electrician Frank (Geoffrey Blake) who is in charge of chasing all of the tenants out. Said tenants include all of the stereotypes for "apartment" in movies: the fat lady who lives downstairs, the old couple upstairs with the husband who is a conspiracy theorist, the lady who works for the phone company that Annie is trying to get her dad involved with...

 Oh yeah, I didn't mention that, did I? So in addition to Clifford working for the railroad and being away from his kids a lot, causing family strife, he's also a widower after the result of something horrible happening to Annie and Johnny's mother. It's not explicitly stated in the film, but I'm guessing it had something to do with why the elevator at the apartment complex doesn't work. Anyway there's this family drama and a sleazeball mechanic who lives in the basement, so you could forgive my slight confusion. Also, the family unwittingly brings home critter eggs. Hey, you go to the RV park, you never know what could come back with you...

 The critters hatch and begin eating people, as they are prone to do, and at least when they kill Frank there's some suspense. But then Rosalie (Diana Bellamy) goes downstairs to see what happened to her laundry and they fail to kill the fat lady, so I kinda knew the score from there on out.

 Luckily, it turns out the asshole stepfather also turns out to be the asshole landlord, and he drags Josh over to the building in the hopes of evicting everybody without having to pay their "relocation fee" before turning the complex into a strip mall. I wonder if he's going to die or not? If it helps, in one of the best "that's why they couldn't call for help," he cuts the phone lines and turns off the power, just because he's that much of an asshole. So yes, of course the critters eat him.

 And nobody else. That's right, while they attack Rosalie and Clifford, they never kill another person in the movie, because everybody else is basically good so they don't need to die. This is the kind of movie that juxtaposes bowling on TV with Annie rolling a trash can down the stairs at critters, complete with a strike for both!

 I'm not actually bagging on Critters 3 because for what it is, it's all right. Certainly better than a lot of "part 3"'s that I can think of (okay, maybe two). This is definitely a movie that "borrows" from Gremlins 2: The New Batch (released the year before), particularly during the section of the movie where the critters just give up on chasing the tenants and goof around in the kitchen. One of them drinks soap and another one eats beans, and then there's a pie fight and antiquing, and I'll let you guess if one of the critters farts or burps bubbles (SPOILER: they do).

 Despite the goofy tone, there are some novel solutions to "getting help" that don't quite pan out but I hadn't necessarily seen in this kind of movie. It isn't always as dumb and obvious as I feared it might be, and when there is gore it's pretty good. Critters 3 was written by David J. Schow (The Crow, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, which Critters 3 is better than) and was directed by Kristine Peterson, who made, uh, Kickboxer 5 and Body Chemistry, but who was also Assistant Director on Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Tremors and Chopping Mall, so she's all right in my book. They both do a pretty good job here of balancing two diametrically opposed genres, and even if it's not as successful as The Monster Squad or The Gate, Critters 3 is entertaining enough.

 This comes in the period of DiCaprio's filmography before he was in This Boy's Life and What's Eating Gilbert Grape and right around the same time he was on Growing Pains, so he's okay. I mean, it's hard to distinguish him from the other kids in the movie other than the fact that he grew up to be the guy who Martin Scorsese works with all of the time, but in 1991 it's not like he was leaps and bounds better than Aimee Brooks or the two kids who played Johnny. He's probably more memorable in The Quick and the Dead, but you have to start out somewhere, right? It's not like they elevated his name on the cover like they did for Jennifer Aniston with Leprechaun.

 Anyway, so as Critters movies go I guess this is one of them. It's a respectable effort and reminds me of the days when New Line Cinema would make these little genre movies and everybody seems to be having a good time doing it. Back before David Fincher and those hobbits made it all prestigious and crap...

 Speaking of "prestigious crap," our next movie stars Django Unchained cameo have-r Franco Nero. And it's not Die Hard 2: Die Harder... or is it?

 * Speculation on the Cap'n's part.