22. WRECK TANGLE: Rubberneck a car crash scene.

Everything Mad Max did right, The Road Warrior does better.

Italy and many other countries remade this over and over.

It changed American pro wrestling thanks to the look of the Road Warriors tag team,. Hawk and Animal.

And it made the end of the world seem awesome.

“Mad Max” Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) lost his family to a biker gang just as the world was ending. Now, he roams the outback and battles even more biker gangs, including Wez (Vernon Wells) and Lord Humongous (Kjell Nilsson), who has perhaps one of the greatest speeches in movie history: “There has been too much violence, too much pain. None here are without sin, but I have an honorable compromise. Just walk away. Leave the pump, the oil, the gasoline, and the whole compound, and I spare your lives. Just walk away. I will give you safe passage in the wasteland. Just walk away and there will be an end to the horror. I await your answer. You have one full day to decide.”

Along with a feral child (Emil Minty) and the gyro captain (Bruce Spence), Max must decide to aid the ragtag people left behind. By the end of the movie, we learn that the child has become Chief of the Great Northern Tribe and has been telling this story all along.

As for Max, he’s the greatest cowboy to not ride a horse. Only George Miller could make a cocktail of Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung and Akira Kurosawa that works this well.

In America, you’d never know this was a sequel. It was sold as a brand new movie and as the first movie aired on cable, people put it together. People loved it; critics too. Roger Ebert said that it was  “one of the most relentlessly aggressive movies ever made.”

I first saw it at the drive-in and was totally shocked when the child kills Wez’s partner with a metal boomerang. Like, it shut me down. I couldn’t believe how non-stop violent this movie was and I’m laughing now, because I totally fell in love with this movie and couldn’t stop drawing it as a kid. So much of what I love — the Bronx Italian films, Fist of the North Star and more — all start here.