Movies That Were Probably Made By a Spasm of Six Year-Olds on Acid: The Top 75 Action Films Poll Results Thread

i like that they had to re-dub mad max for an american audience b/c the australian accents (except for mel) were so gnarly.

i know

it took me a long time to move past that..

all that nasalness, gone

Feel like comedies (maybe even romcoms) would have to be broken down by decade. There are so many!

Mad Max is more of a Death Wish/hardass 70s cop film, a genre I don't have much interest in/sympathy for

the whole "I am the last bastion of law and order in an evil wasteland of amorality" theme is just ugh whatever do not care

i. just. don't. CARE. DAD!!!!

zu: warriors of the magic mountain?

amateurist you realize this movie, like some of the others you mentioned, was basically unseeable until a few years ago. i'm not real surprised it didn't make this list. but it is just big and dumb enough to be an ILX cult favorite. it should be. it's so overwhelmingly crazy that after about 45 minutes you almost enter a kind of hypnagogic state, the most fabulous, impossible things happening before your eyes and you barely register them.

lol s1ocki

but yeah it's a reactionary/moralizing film that nonetheless revels in rape and gore, not really my favorite combination.

its a pretty bad combination when u put it like that

amateurist you realize this movie, like some of the others you mentioned, was basically unseeable until a few years ago.

What happened? Zu: Warriors was a staple of early 90s HK film retrospectives out here for a long time.

• ROMCOMS
• THRILLERS (imagine a lot of overlap w/ action poll)

xxpost it is a fine combination. it's just not a film for babies :D (runs away)

literally and figuratively, lol

*cries*

*watches romcom*

there's a girl called Bridget Jones I think you'll really like, Shakey

in seriousness though, I personally am the opposite with the revenge/Death Wish/bad ppl are mean and IMMA GET EM, I love that kinda stuff. And just seeing a dystopian Australia that looks *sorta* like where I grew up but not quite, but with all this crazy violence,I always found that exciting. Plus just with all the Aussieness it's become a very good homesickness tonic for me.

don't cry shakey <3

*eats tub of ice cream*

*cleans gun*

amateurist you realize this movie, like some of the others you mentioned, was basically unseeable until a few years ago. i'm not real surprised it didn't make this list. but it is just big and dumb enough to be an ILX cult favorite. it should be. it's so overwhelmingly crazy that after about 45 minutes you almost enter a kind of hypnagogic state, the most fabulous, impossible things happening before your eyes and you barely register them.

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Friday, February 17, 2012 5:50 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a good description. my most vivid memory of that movie is the crazy neon lime green color they use for a lot of the costumes. not a color you see enough at the movies.

i saw this on your standard "midnight movies" HK series in boston ca. 2000, so it can't have been all that rare.

i mean if you lived in a big city in the 1980s and 1990s it wasn't that hard to see a lot of these HK movies. you could also rent the poor-quality VHS tapes if you wanted to.

Wasn't Mel's voice dubbed, too, when "Mad Max" made it over here?

Anyway, some revisionism going when when people compare "Mad Max" to stuff like Death Wish. Want to say Mel doesn't go rogue until close to 4/5ths into the movie. Then there's, like, 15 minutes of sadistic revenge.

VCD was an easy way to get a lot of cool HK flicks in the late 90s

the lead-up - gang of wild crazies terrorize helpless women and children, and the attendant rape/carnage/destruction - is straight out of Death Wish, come on now.

xp

i guess i'm not surprised but some of those rape revenge movies like 'thriller' probably deserve honorable mention in this poll.

xpost

oh man, VCDs. i had a ton of those.

i mean i guess i'm not surprised they didn't get nominated or voted for...

it's like Death Wish meets, I dunno, Bullitt or something

xp

Well, there are bad guys doing bad things. But Max isn't out for blood until a lot later. Unlike Death Wish, which is all revenge pretty early.

At school we would all pack the theatre for Jackie Chan night. Also at the Art Institute. This was all in the couple of years before they started re-releasing them in truncated, dubbed versions.

but yeah the road warrior is much better than mad max. the action scenes in particular. george miller has had a really, really peculiar career.

lorenzo's oil, while not remotely an action film, is a very good medical drama.

oh and supposedly miller is directing a 4th mad max movie ?!?!?!?!

George Miller will be directing the 4th Mad Max movie. Shooting was originally scheduled to begin in 2011, but rare high levels of rain in the Australian shoot location made flowers bloom, which detracted from the post-apocalyptic feeling that Miller was going for.[3] Instead, shooting will begin in Namibia, Africa.[4] Tom Hardy will be Mad Max, with Charlize Theron as costar.[5] Theron's character will be missing the lower half of her left arm -- her stunt double will be Annabelle Williams.[6]

but I don't WANT tom hardy to be Mad Max

does he seriously have to be in ALL of the movies?

Well, there are bad guys doing bad things.

yeah but "bad guys doing bad things" a lot of times turned into a very specific thing in the 70s - the gang of loony rapists appears in a lot of 70s films (Peckinpah springs to mind) and it's usually really unpleasant because a) the voyeurism/joy of the novelty of showing boobs is really self-evident and b) it's ridiculously over the top.

Why isn't Sam Worthington doing it, I wonder? He was a great Road Warrior in the first half of Terminator 4.

okay, there are two zu movies on netflix. do i watch them both?

zu warriors and zu warriors from the magic mountain.

you watch the 2nd of those, the one from 1983

Mad Max has some great stunts, just really wild, and I do re-cast it in my head as apocalyptic blah but yeah if we're gonna talk about unpleasant then a lot of action films -- Assault, Mad Max, Dirty Harry, etc -- are either right wing fantasies or play with those elements, are OTT and have 'fun' with that too.

Worthington was supposed to be the nu-Max iirc. He sucks tho

vegemitegrrl, do you love the rachel ward revenge/schoolchildren movie? i love that one. speaking of aussie revenge. plus, i still want to marry rachel ward.

http://www.crawfords.com.au/libary/movie/images/fortress.jpg

Dirty Harry is totally more fun than Mad Max, mostly due to Clint's dry sarcasm.

I need to re-watch Assault but I remember it being more sneakily subversive than right-wing

xp

the gang of loony rapists appears in a lot of 70s films

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erm7QDCl-3s

The kid getting shot in Assault => surely nastier than anything on MM?

omg scott - that movie!! I saw that when I was a kid. If it's the one I'm thinking of it terrified me.

maybe i'll watch 13 assassins tonight. haven't see that. so many options...

Those masks were awful and then there was this part where they had to swim in like caves or something iirc.

fortress is intense. and amazing. and i think it was just an aussie t.v. movie, right?

I am looking for something to watch on demand and Last of the Mohicans is under "Action". Would you guys consider that an action movie?

Fortress is awesome. I watched it SO much growing up, but I havent' seen it in years. Is it based on the Chowchilla kidnappings?

lol i forgot about rapist jeff goldblum in death wish

Scott, 13 Assassins is BAD.ASS. You should def watch that.

The kid getting shot in Assault => surely nastier than anything on MM?

I don't remember tbh

the thing with one of the convicts playing a key role in the defense of the precinct thankfully muddies the politics of the movie considerably

xp