From the Rental Vault: The Road Warrior

So what do you do when you're going to release a sequel in the U.S. to a movie that pretty much nobody in the U.S. saw?

You retitle it, of course, so what was Mad Max 2 in its native Australia and most everywhere else became The Road Warrior here in the States. And thus a thousand grade-Z post-apocalyptic movies were spawned from George Miller's vision of a blasted, blighted wasteland damaged by war, disappearing resources and further degraded by vicious survivors. While many of them managed to get some of the look right, none of them measured up to the high-octane thrill ride of Road Warrior.

Mel Gibson, complete with his natural Australian accent, returns as Max Rocketanksy, a former police officer whose life crumbled into ruins along with the remnants of the civilization he was trying to protect. Now a wanderer in the wastelands of the Australian interior, he finds his fate intertwined with a group of people who've managed to keep an oil refinery working long enough to pump out the gasoline they need to reach more habitable areas. Standing against them are a masked man who calls himself the Lord Humungus and a group of leather-wearing, mohawked bikers who want the gasoline for themselves.

When Road Warrior came out, several reviewers noted that it was modeled on some classic Western themes -- the besieged townfolks, the mysterious stranger who may or may not save them, the wide-open and beautifully desolate country and more than a few others. Gibson has a handful of lines and there are long stretches of the movie where the story is told without dialogue and with only visuals, music and ambient noise.

Many of the special effects look dated more than 30 years after the movie's release, especially the fast-forwarded sequences meant to show fast action. But nothing beats the final chase scene and only Raiders of the Lost Ark rivals it. So set aside the dated effects and the endless series of derivative knockoffs that meant food on the table for a lot of mediocre pretty actresses and mediocre square-jawed anti-heroes but nothing much for anyone else. Such as the people dogged by insomnia and the limited film library of the USA network's old Up All Night series, for example. Return to a time when Mel Gibson was an Aussie actor people liked, the visuals of a decayed world following some catastrophe weren't hackneyed retreads and an action movie director might decide his work should be a little artistic as well as energetic. Take a ride on a white-line nightmare with The Road Warrior.