FILM

Rip It Up, Issue 61, 1 August 1982, Page 26

FILM

Mad Max 2 Director: George Miller The worthy censor may have denied us gentle Kiwis the opportunity to see Miller's first Mad Max film, but the second has made the hop across the Tasman. The film offers a stark vision of Australia in the wake of World War 111. Life and death is centred around fuel as the masked giant Humungus and his marauding punks attack a small community

built around a petrol refinery. But along comes Mel Gibson as Max Rockatansky to uphold the forces of good in a stunning melange of western, bike movie and comic strip. Mad Max 2's budget was ten times that of its precursor and it shows a film-with real visual elan and presence. Miller has cleverly balanced the demands of each of the film's genres, tied it all together with some of the tightest editing this side of the Odessa Steps sequence and the Dolby soundarama is cataclysmic. The Cat People Director: Paul Schrader It must have seemed an interesting project this, taking one of the classic Val Lewton horror films of the 40s and updating it for the 80s, thus taking advantage of a more generous budget and the opportunities for more explicit violence. Graphic sequences of arms being severed may strike a responsive note in some bosoms, but somehow it doesn't quite come off. Like many of the Lewton films, Cat People has a fairly preposterous plot, and a more oblique treatment is altogether more effective than Schrader's more realistic conception. The film hinges on the feline duo of Malcolm McDowell and Nastassia Kinski, although I warmed more to the pragmatic Annette O'Toole, and Ruby Dee does what she can with a very underwritten part. The last twelve months have seen a spate of re-makes The Postman Rings Twice, Body Heat, and now Cat People. Body Heat wins by a mile ... or two. Britannia Hospital Director: Lindsay Anderson Anderson is not the sort of director who exactly floods the theatres of the world with his films and, after his last, the 1976 O Lucky Man, the new Britannia Hospital was tempting fare. Taking Britannia Hospital as a microcosm of the ailing British establishment itself, Anderson opts for a complex plot structure based around a megalomaniac transplant surgeon, the imminent visit of H.R.H. (a sweet old character actress who has a few features in common s with the Queen Mother) and various union and political strife. The energy and gusto of Britannia Hospital is undeniable and is one of the things that holds the film together. Graham Crowden as the crazed Professor Millar, last seen grafting hitchhiker's heads on to sheep's bodies in O Lucky Man, the marvellous Vivian Pickles is the starchiest of matrons (to hear her deliver the word "succour" alone is worth the price of the

ticket), and other memorables include Dandy Nichols, Arthur Lowe, Joan Plowright, Marsha Hunt, Robin Askwith, not forgetting Malcom McDowell in his continuing role as Mick Travis. Here is a film that is rich in detail, as was O Lucky Man, but such profusion of incident and character is not served as well as it was in the earlier film. That it doesn't quite add up to the sum of its parts is disappointing, as is the involvement of Alan Price, whose contribution seems to be mainly a series of variations on 'Rule Britannia' whereas his songs in O Lucky Man were an integral part of the film's structure. Death Wish II Director: Michael Winner Charles Bronson stomping his way through a rampage of revenge, systematically picking off a group of hoodlums who raped and murdered his housekeeper and then did the same thing to his daughter, who had not yet recovered from all the awful things done to her in the first Death Wish film. Complete with a sub-plot questioning the police's efficiency in controlling violence and the "duty" of the private citizen to take the law into his own hands. Death Wish has pretensions to seriousness. If it works at all, it is because of the ghoulish fascination of waiting for each of the five punks to come to his bloody end. Most of the deaths, however, are distinct anti-climaxes after the spectacular demise of the daughter. The film has its gruesome fascination and I could well imagine supporters of the new . MoralMajority getting a vicarious kick out of it, while Charles Bronson and Jill Ireland give two of the most wooden performances this side of the State Forest. . William Dart