Mad Max as an exploitation film - film review

Exploitation films have been around since the beginning of film itself. Originally these films would have been presented in Circus tents, and would pick up on morality tales to get audiences out and make them feel better about their lives. The banning of film companies owning cinemas really marked the turn around for exploitation films. Exploitation met A list films to create entirely new genres and opportunities.

Mad Max (1979) for many was a highly influential and game changing film. In keeping with it’s B movie roots, the film was directed by George Miller. He was not a qualified, or highly experienced filmmaker, but rather a medical doctor and a short-film experimenter. He made the film using highly experimental and groundbreaking methods. The film also arrived in the middle of a massive period of change for Australian filmmaking. R rated films had only been introduced to the country in 1970, so many of the national filmmakers were beginning to explore what this meant for film creation and how far these boundaries could be pushed.

Mad Max is a revenge story set in a dystopian future. however,the actual revenge requiring event doesn’t actually happen until roughly 15 minutes from the end of the film. This means that there is not much time for the revenge to actually take place, so this cannot really be seen as the main purpose of the movie. However, the movie is full of common exploitation themes including; murder, revenge, motorcycles and cars. These manifest in large, extravagant chase scenes.

When the third film, in the now well established franchise, is realeased, how much is the movie still an example of exploitation?

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) follows the formula set by the previous movies. There are a large number of interesting looking, modified futuristic vehicles, being driven at high speed, crashing and turning into fireballs. When compared to the original, Fury Road has a much more basic storyline. A group of escaped sex slaves run away in a truck, aiming to get to a utopian free land across a vast dessert. They travel there and they travel back. This movie is not about the journey, but rather about the exploitation themes running through it, of women in prison, motorcycles and cars. The majority of the film is spent on the fight between different groups while they are trying to make the journey. This fits into the exploitation film genre, however some of the production methods of this film move away from the traditions of the genre. Traditionallly Exploitation films were made on a very small budget, and therefore kept visuallly fairly simple. Fury Road, however, had quite a large budget and used a lot of visual and special effects to add to the dramatic nature of the film.

Both films, for me, seem to easily fit into the exploitation film category very easily, but each in a different way, leading to films unlike any other, with an appeal that continues across nearly 40 years.