Mad Max Ripoffs: Waterworld!

Theme: Flood I - The Sisters of Mercy

1995's Waterworld is more famous for its troubled production than for its actual content. Plenty of people went to see it, and the extent to which it was considered a flop was entirely due to spiralling costs due to exceeding its schedule. Much derided at the time, it's since become a favourite of revisionists who want to ackshyouwally that it's really pretty good. Un/fortunately, it really is that bad, though.

I'll allow that it has some really fun action in between 400 scenes of people bickering aboard a sailboat.

In the far future, global warming has flooded the world, leaving the survivors searching an interminable ocean for a hint of dry land. One survivor (Kevin Costner) TEAMS UP with Jeanne Tripplehorn and her funny name, and her adopted daughter, whose back bears a cryptic tattoo that may or may not be a map to the fabled land, pursued by Dennis Hopper and his crew of evil smokers, so named because they smoke cigarettes, which is the 90sest thing I've ever heard.

There's something so incongruous about a post-apocalyptic warlord fucking smoking. It just looks like he's come back from a break between takes and the continuity editor didn't notice.

The problems are three: firstly, the movie drags. It's easily half an hour too long. I think this about ~90% of movies, but I think it harder about this one. Secondly, the protags are unlikable: Costner is a douche to Tripplehorn and the brat, and both are annoying right back at him. It's clear they wanted a grumpy-protag-gradually-warms-to-his-unwanted-charges dynamic, but Six String Samurai did it much better. As with most H*llywood slop, this leaves only the villain to root for, because at least he's entertaining. Not coincidentally, the scenes that drag are all the ones without Hopper chewing the scenery, whether modelling a wooden eye or donning a pirate hat just for jolly wouldn't you?

In a world of Kevins Costner, be a Dennis Hopper.

Thirdly and worstly, though, the movie sucks because Costner's protagonist is a horrifying Innsmouth monster with webbed feet and gills.

Yessireebob, I reckon them eldritch blasphemies got as much right callin' themselves American as you or I do. If they want to worship Dagon with perverted rites out of the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred til the stars are right and great Cthulhu crawls out of the sea to drive men mad, well I say count it a blessing of liberty, partner. They can lay their eggs in my daughter anyday.

Note that this isn't, like many Mad Max ripoffs, a post-nuclear wasteland; the apocalypse was global warming, so there's no reason to have mutants except for rampant incest, which the writers seem to be aware of:

One generation of fucking your immediate family is OK, but two is pushing it, and three? Well, that's just plain distasteful.

As an horrific mutant myself, let me be the first to state that Representation does not Matter when it comes to heroic leading men. If I wanted a protagonist with hideous deformities, I'd write my autobiography.

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: I think I spotted the odd one among the smokers.

SHOULDER PADS: Hopper's first outfit counts.

CUSTOM CARS: Not really, plenty of boats though.

MUTANTS: Ol' Kev.

GOGGLES: Several smokers wear them, Costner dons them when he boards the Deez.

TOTAL: 4/5 - pretty damn post-apocalyptic.

Accidentally Rìght Wìng Movies 3: The Final Chapter!!11

Theme: My Own World - Screeching Weasel

Scarface

"So how come there are still more women and children on these boats than on the ones landing in Europe every day?" Uhh, SILENCE NO MORE QUESTIONS

See? No one fleeing the authorities could ever be a bad man.

Fury Road

Both Mad Max movies (1979's original and 1980's Road Warrior) are extremely, even hilariously, based and rightist, and are not coincidentally among the greatest and best movies of all time ever made. Evidently, then, sometime between 1980 and 1989 (1984, perhaps?), George Miller must have been treated to a re-education course at the Ministry of Love, because everything he's done since then has gone the route of pozmaxxing in craven imitation of h*llywood. Fury Road is, on its face, a feminist thesis:

Of course, this doesn't work at all. The villains are supposed to be religious fanatics who make wahmen wear oppressive garments and blow themselves up in suicide attacks, which can't help but evoke a real-world group that rockets up and down the progressive stack caste system hierarchy depending upon whether we're supposed to be justifying bombing them into paste or mass importing them in any given conversation. Since you're not allowed to talk about that, though, the War Boyz (perhaps named in honour of Games Workshop's tabletop Mad Max ripoff game Gorkamorka; only 90s kids will remember this) have an hilarious white power skinhead aesthetic instead, which fits so poorly it almost works as meta parody of how only one group is ever vilified on film.

Their logo looks a lot like that of 90s MTV staple The Offspring for some reason. I mention this only because where else am I going to find a segue to observe that blink-182's smily face logo mogs N*rvana's smily face logo with the force of a medium-sized tactical nuke:

I'd have kys'd myself too.

But even if you take the War Boyz at face value, they're still somehow the good guys, because the movie actually demonstrates the noble feminist collective completely fucked up and destroyed their prelapsarian idyllic Green Space, leaving nothing but barren desert, while Immortan Joe has managed to carve out a functioning society against all odds, sensibly rationing water and maintaining peace through trade with his most dangerous neighbouring factions. Furiosa selfishly effects the escape of his wives, dooming the entire populace as Joe needs an heir to maintain continuity of governance. This was of such pivotal importance throughout history that the Ottoman Empire actually made it the law that when a new sultan was crowned he had to murder all his brothers to prevent a civil war over the leadership, so Joe's far milder and more reasonable efforts to ensure he leaves a single viable heir are just plain responsible.

My boi did NOTHING wrong.

When Furiosa murders Joe and assumes leadership herself, she opens the floodgates controlling the water supply, ensuring it will run out quickly and the entire citadel will die of thirst. The only way to counter this reading of the ending is to argue that the water in the middle of this desert is just infinite for no reason, which is insane, but is how leftists actually think things work, which is why you can't let them run anything, ever.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Story

Interestingly, the Furiosa prequel is actually a bit more based, in that the main villain is plainly Karl Marx: an evil beardo who exhorts the dregs of Joe's society to rise up and murder their rulers, which exhortation falls flat in one of the funniest and most satisfying scenes I've ever seen, with Joe just wiping out Karl's vanguard with impunity. The movie still has major problems, but if you just watch it as a standalone and edit out the last few scenes that set up Fury Road, at least you get a happy ending with Immortan Joe in charge.

Funny Games

Michael Haneke's home invasion flick, like much midwitcore, attempted to indict the audience, forcing them to question why they were still watching the sadistic brutalising of a family for entertainment. Thing is, though, Haneke made anti-white agitslop flick Caché/Hidden, too, so he endorses the invasion of white countries and the rapes and murders that ensue in real life, making a farce out of his impotent efforts to shame his viewers, who, despite his intro-to-philosophy-ass efforts to muddy the waters, can distinguish perfectly well between fiction and reality.

Incidentally, I've yet to come across a libjoint that can't be improved just by adding a laugh track.

For instance, in this fiction the home invaders are clean-cut whitebois with bourgeois manners, which turns an otherwise quite mundane horror effort into an hilarious accidental satire of the movie industry's near-blanket whitewashing of crime. As edgecore, it's easily mogged by Irreversible or The Poughkeepsie Tapes, but as absurdist comedy, it's pretty funny, except for the extended sequence when the killers leave, which is supposed to make you bored and then feel bad for feeling happy when they show back up again, which also doesn't work because noone feels bad for enjoying a black comedy in which bad things happen, nor does anyone care what a shitlib with the blood of Mollie Tibbets and Lee Rigby all over his hands thinks of our moral character.

Batman Returns

The reason Batman sucks today is that filmmakers, like a primitive cargo cult, have fallen into the pattern of treating the material seriously, whereas all the classic Caped Crusadery of yore was basically an human centipede of gleeful parody: the 1960s show with Adam West lampooned the 1940s serials, then Burton upended the colourful antics of the show by making its daft villains into horrifying monsters. Burton was essentially shitcanned in favour of Schumacher because the suits completely failed to see the humour in his children-traumatising depiction of the 60s' lovable cad Penguin as a deformed Caligariesque creature who lurks the sewers seething with hatred for the Christmas festivities above.

Really makes one think!

Another group[citation needed] who failed to see the humour were Jews (which explains the state of standup). After self-reporting hard over They Live scant years before, G-d's least self-aware Chosen Race shrieked en masse that the subterranean villain was clearly meant to represent them.

Jews not see an horrifically evil monster and blurt out "he's just like me fr fr" challenge: apparently impossible.

Never mind that Oswald's parents' gravestones are shown in the movie and both bear Christian crosses; our tiny-hatted Brahmins reacted to this flick like Claudius reacted to that play in Hamlet. Just astonishing, really. Returns picks up bonus points for the fact timid secretary Selina Kyle starts spouting feminist clichés after she goes insane and becomes (Burtonised) Cat Woman.

We're really testing the folk wisdom that hot chicks can't be cringe.

Oliver!

The much-loved musical adaptation of Charles Dickens' old/pol/ classic attempts subtly to rehabilitate evil child groomer Fagin by portraying him as a kindly, comical old anti-villain with an heart of gold. Too bad the lyrics let slip a different tale:

Here, Fagin indoctrinates the class of 1838 to sing the praises of his most favoured alum, and least symbolically named Dickens character, William H. Psycho (colourised).

As with X-Men, you half wonder whether the DP went rogue and used his magic to reveal a more truthful take on the character, as he appears first cloaked in steam with a fork reminiscent of the devil's pitchfork:

You keep your goddamn wiener away from those kids, buddy. I don't care if they were promised to you 3000 years ago.

The movie ends with Sikes (the monster) lynched by the ubiquitous angry mob while Frankenstein (Fagin) escapes, briefly to entertain the notion of going straight before allowing a literal child to talk him out of it - yeah, right!

You do that, average screenwriter.

My Fair Lady

Audrey casually hat-mogs every wahman ever to wear hats. Good game, hatlets, but this is real life.

Before incel evopsych theory was declared thoughtcrime, it was universally agreed to be true and the basis for one of the most beloved (by wahmen!) movie musicals. Audrey Hepburn must CHOOSE between a sweet-natured dork who adores her and a total dickhead who relentlessly abuses her, and ends the movie stiffing the nice dork and going back to the asshole, which is portrayed as perfectly fine. Based both for validating the theory and because it pits a chick against a dude and the dude wins hands-down, flawless victory. Literally impossible to imagine a movie like this being made today, and not only because it's good.

Dead End Drive In

Kinda-sorta Mad Max ripoff Dead End Drive In has a great B-movie premise: a young couple go to the drive-in movie only to find their wheels stolen and themselves stranded overnight, whereupon they discover that the drive-in is secretly a prison camp to get unemployed delinquents off the street. Sadly this premise is completely wasted because it just turns into an insane screed about how anyone concerned about immigration is LE BAD and (naturally) a heckin natzeerino. No, that doesn't make any sense, but that's what happens. Car chases and 80s new wave fashions abound but you, the viewer, now have less hope of enjoying escapism than the inmates depicted onscreen.

Bear in mind that in the movie's own backstory there was a full-scale genocide of whites but you're still not allowed to have any concerns about our collective wellbeing. Also note that they made it April Fool's Day, because, y'know:

Now we know that the result of open-door immigration policy throughout the west and Anglosphere has been mass stabbings and mass rape, our never very likable protagonist reveals himself a villain for the ages. In this scene, damningly nailing the mental killswitch in the leftoid brain that led to the atrocities of Rotherham and others, his response to his gf's concern that a migrant might rape her is, literally, "nah".

If only crimestop ever served to stop an actual crime.

This reading renders the otherwise mundane ending (he physically escapes the prison camp) more interesting, because he's only traded a physical prison for a mental one. But, as always, that's a layer too many for the writers to apprehend.

Candyman

Sometimes they just come right out and say it.

"Aha, Pat, this time you have reached too far and cannot but beclown yourself", you titter impishly, rubbing your doughy, sweaty palms together like a rotund fly, for surely noone can question the impeccable on-messageness of Candyman, that much-needed reminder that It's All White Peephole's Fault for slayvery and raycism. Or so it seems until you actually watch it and he just admits straight up that his victims are innocent:

"Uhhh, your honour, uhhh, my client's IQ, which doesn't exist, makes him unfit to stand trial. Release him on the populace at once!"

The actual message of this unintentional kino, therefore, is "it doesn't matter if something bad happened to you, you can still choose whether or not to be an evil piece of shit". You wouldn't think that would be an extreme right-wing position, but the entire mass media and ""justice"" system disagree with you. What about red lining under FDR? The Kay Kay Kay? What about Micro Aggressions? The Talk! What about the heckin En Wooord?

Total Recall

Spoilers for this one, like you haven't seen it.

>mrw dinner isn't on the table the minute I slouch in from a long day at the ḇłồģ mines

This one's actually pretty fun in that it uses all the audience programming motifs to get you to play along with its conceit because they couldn't not do it that way. You know - the Good Guys are The Rebels, the Bad Corporation is white mayles, Arnie's hot blonde wife is evil and the brown woman is good, and so on. But then, if you're paying attention, the whole plot is fake and gay in-story, so actually that's all nonsense pumped into his brain, which he chooses to continue to believe at the end anyway, because it makes him feel like a hero. I think there's a good chance Paul Verhoeven is actually trolling libs while pretending to be trolling chuds badly, but I wouldn't want to blow his cover, so don't tell anyone.

WILL this be the final chapter? PROBABLY, because I think you get the POINT. It is impossible to make anything simultaneously good and l*ft-wing, because the truth slips through the cracks, like Hope ever outpacing the demons of Pandora's box. There's a certain disingenuous type who will bewail this sort of post as Doing A Heckin Culture War, implicitly maintaining that the multi-billion dollar industry filling these flicks with their increasingly unhinged ideological tantrums is not Doing A Heckin Culture War; only autists with small ƃlởgǥes noticing and easily destroying them with shitposts in our spare time. We'll keep laughing at them - and we'll win!

Mad Max Ripoffs: Clash of the Warlords!

Is 1985's Clash of the Warlords, AKA Mad Warrior, the shittiest Mad Max ripoff of all? Yes.

The version I watched on YouTube opens with a two-minute-long freeze frame of this explosion. Presumably it was intended to be filled in with opening titles or voiceover narration, but nah. Leave a comment if your version played differently, because I'm dying for that deep lore.

In this spin on the post-nuke world, goofily costumed baddy Malzon (????, Mad Warrior) entertains himself by making all his best fighters off one another in gladiatorial axe fights, which is strange, because he later muses that his main disadvantage against his enemies is fewer men. I disagree with this assessment, though, because it's clear his real main disadvantage is that he's a dribbling idiot even by post-nuke megalomaniac standards.

Malzon looks like the one guy at every Halloween party who put effort into his costume and now feels like a NERD.

Nor, dear reader, is this solely my assessment: for Malzon goes into an ear-biting meltdown every time he sees the moon, at which point his own goons chain him up and openly laugh at him for the gigatard he is. There's nothing quite like an outnumbered, mentally challenged villain whose own minions treat him as a huge joke to instill fear into the hearts of viewers.

Without his Phantom of the Opera mask, he looks like a Filipino Toxic Avenger.

If you think this lunar fixation will come into play at a timely moment to change the outcome of the movie, you'd be wrong: it's never mentioned again. Rather, his not particularly tragic downfall is precipitated by the escape of one of his gladiators, Rex, who goes to join the rebels from Return of the Jedi. That might seem like just a throwaway comparison, but this fucking gem has the brass balls to close out on a lightsaber fight straight out of a Star Wars fan film:

I love how there's no attempt to hide or fudge it whatsoever: they even use the same colour-coding.

It's clear director Willy Milan (I swear this is the name he's credited with on The Movie Database) just dumps whatever he liked in other movies into his, which is endearing, but incoherent. The movie literally ends with Rex riding off on a horse because I guess Ol' Willy saw a western once. For all its faults, Clash boasts one ace that sets it apart from the pack: its searing Top Gun Ray Bans beer commercial cock rock soundtrack is insultingly good for so farcical a project. If a cleaned-up version exists anywhere, send it my way, because it stomps absolute prostate.

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: none.

SHOULDER PADS: special mention must go to the female lead's choice to don gold-plated ones, which in a low-res YT upload make her look like something off the Soldiers Under Command album cover.

Damn, Michael Sweet looks like that?

CUSTOM CARS: we have to count this dorky looking tricycle:

Lord Humungus and Wez would have raped this guy so many times.

MUTANTS: presumably Malzon.

GOGGLES: IDK, I don't recall any.

TOTAL: 3/5 - uuuurghhh