Thursday, August 20, 2015

Mad Max Re-Envisioned: Go-Kart and Paintball Insanity Edition [Video]

Screen Shot 2015-08-19 at 1.56.10 PMThe genius of Mad Max: Fury Road is that it never loses sight of the renegade spirit that made the first installment of the Mad Max saga such a revelatory work when it debuted in 1979. Working with that same philosophy and distilling it even further, filmmaker Devin Graham, a.k.a. Devin Super Tramp, and his team of assistants have produced a remake of Fury Road’s climatic chase scene, replacing the full-size vehicles and weapons with go-karts and paintball guns. The results are mind-blowing.

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Tasked with defending the mother ship and its cargo—in this case a Dodge pickup with a fuel tank in the back—Max’s Interceptor go-kart wears what appears to be a highly modified Corvette C3 body shell, not unlike the type favored for parade duty by Shriners. The gritty, near-sepia hued drama begins with Max manually pull-starting his ride; soon pursuers are attacking from all sides in a fleet of vehicles built on the bones of go-carts and ATVs. The cinematography is brilliant, the soundtrack artfully heightens the tension level, and ten seconds in, most viewers are oblivious to the fact that the future of civilization is riding on a go-kart powered by a lawnmower engine.

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Produced in association with Warner Brothers Games to create some advance hype for the upcoming release of the Mad Max video game, Graham was assisted in the filming of the short by Dakota Walbeck and Nick Sales, and something called a “Red Dragon” camera—sounds cool, even if we don’t know what it is—was used for the chase-scene footage. Andy Sims and Seth Jones created the vehicles and claim to have spent about eight weeks fabricating the fleet. The entire short was filmed in Green River, Utah.

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As with the big-budget Max movies, live-action stunt work is present in spades, and ultimately, that’s what makes it all stick. Hal Needham would be proud.

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