Hailing from Sydney, The Mad Max Remix tours to Melbourne with a brilliant and satirical one hour mash-up of the three original cult cinema flicks. The audience is presented with a live cinematic experience: visual projections of silent film footage sequenced to the newly written comedic narratives, created by three voice artists/actors, two foleys, and one sound tech.

Charting a coming of age journey, the overall presentation successfully shifts the original Mad Max characters into new personas that engage the audience in an hilarious flash-back dream-noir style super flick. The well-considered storyline runs to a tight script with a hint of improvisation to suit the mood, and overlays new narrative situations that revel in the lost possibilities of the original flicks, recontextualising the lowlights into comedic highlights, and of course, concocting a forbidden love story along the way.

There is a certain clunkiness to the mashed (edited) screen excerpts, as they butt against each other in their newly ordered visual chronicle, but this is pleasing, as each scene operates as an independent frame within a larger series of images, and is reminiscent of a comic book experience.

Foley artists Blaine Cooper and Lil O’Neill work intensely behind the crowd with their sound set-up: cabbages, foam balls, shoes, guitars and hairspray to generate the sound effects, and should function as a core element of the performance, if you can pull your eyes away from the visual directive the projected image commands.

The show will appeal to both hardcore Mad Max fans, for whom these movies are embedded with cult status into their psyche, and also to those less familiar with the originals, as the script engages a variety of old and new pop culture screen references. A fine embodiment of the Fair Use for Satire and Parody clause in Australian Copyright Law, The Mad Max Remix should be seen on all accounts.

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