Film and television reviews and sometimes a few other things.
Aah, Beyond Thunderdome. Truly the misfit of the Mad Max franchise. The only one to put basically zero focus on cars, but shitloads of focus on actual shit. Also the only one with a tie-in single (it was 1985, after all). Beyond Thunderdome is a wild ride, but not in a good way. We’d better get started.
Continue reading “Should You Watch: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome?”
The best way to think of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is if you took the original Mad Max, broke it down into its constituent parts (the Australian Outback, Mel Gibson, car stunts and leather), injected those parts with some experimental growth hormone, watched them all go crazy and then stuck them all back together. That’s a really ham-fisted metaphor, and I apologize – the point I’m trying to make is that The Road Warrior is big, bold and bloody brilliant, making its predecessor look like a weakling left behind in the dust.
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The first time I watched Blade Runner was when I was in university. I don’t remember the exact circumstances that led me to discovering the film, but I think it was featured in one of the multitudes of “10 Sci-Fi Films You Need to See Before You Kick Off This Mortal Coil” lists, and as sci-fi is pretty much my favourite genre of anything, I was eager for a new offering to devour (the film also single-handedly introduced me to the cyberpunk genre, which has been my favourite niche ever since). This is going to sound really hyperbolic, and I’m sorry about that, but Blade Runner really was one of those films that was a turning point for me. It was a revelation.
Akira is a movie with an absolutely massive cult following. It’s another one of those films that for a long time I had only heard about, and because it was kind of hard to access (when I was younger, at least, before you could easily stream things online) it remained unseen and unknowable to me – like a trendy secret that I’d only seen stills from online.
The Fly II is an abjectly disgusting movie. I am writing this whilst eating my breakfast and I instantly regret doing that, because I’m having to remember everything I found gross about the film and still try and stomach my cereal. The Fly II is a film that you should watch only after you have squared away your evening meal a few hours prior.
The Fly is a sci-fi body horror film directed by one of the masters of the body horror genre, David Cronenberg, and released in 1986. It is a remake of the 1958 film, although this version really dials the grotesqueness of the protagonist’s transformation into the fly-human hybrid up to one hundred and eleven.