The people are called things like Auntie Entity, Scrooloose, The Collector, and Master-Blaster. The last-named is actually two people, a dwarfish genius who rides piggyback on his masked bodyguard, and together they rule the Underworld (or power source) of Bartertown. Auntie Entity, who rules the rest of Bartertown, wants to separate them, kill the body but keep the brain. ("We're dealing with subtleties here," proclaims one of her admiring minions.) The genius himself gives little display of his powers of intellect, especially when he expresses himself in such grammar as "Me explain" and "Us want justice." But if it is linguistic cleverness you want, there is the raggedy Lord-of-the-Flies youth colony in the desert, where they employ such language as "They does the pictures so they'd member all the knowin' that they'd lost" and "They said bye-dee-bye to them what they'd birthed." This is the post-apocalyptic future, you see, and the third installment in the Mad Max saga has gone a good deal further into a freak-show atmosphere, with oddity piled atop oddity. Everything and everybody sneer at you, snarl at you, snap at you: the Fellini-esque ringmaster of the gladitorial arena ("Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, dyin' time's here"); the bullet-headed hatchet man who sports a Japanese folk mask on a stick above his head (and who turns out to have an almost Wile E. Coyote resilience in combat); and so forth. The connection between Bartertown and the youth colony is a little tenuous, even fortuitous, as if the story were being made up as it went along, and the shock tactics can only revive your interest for an instant. With Mel Gibson and Tina Turner; co-directed by George Miller and George Ogilvie. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd
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