The lone gunslinger arrives in a besieged border town. A strange reaction until we consider that the film is basically a spaghetti western.

He has made a package across the world, striking a particular nerve in Italy. 1981’s “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior” was a different story. Deciding to double the cast with flat American accents and understandably confused about how to sell such a genuinely odd movie, they settled for a generic cop on the edge of the rim “Dirty Harry” in the muscle cars. A modest success in the United States, it was roughed up by its overseas distributor AIP. There had been stories of “life after the mushroom cloud” before, but it was “Mad Max” (1979) that led the way for what was to come. The Italian post-apocalypse was garish, didn’t care at all about the internal logic of the story, and if it could capitalize on several other current successes as well, so much the better. Their American cousins tended to be serious or at least take for granted that everything was about to be made of glass and ashes by the Great, and set out to find out what humanity would do with it. And few genres were a pure play of madness and color like the post-apocalyptic Italian films that filled the shelves of video stores from Montana to Missouri.

Few genres encapsulate the excesses and anxieties of the 70s and 80s better than post-apocalyptic films. Castellari, a director of movies with such amazing titles as “Any Gun Can Play” and “Kill Them All and Come Back Alone”. To understand where exactly “Fury Road” came from, it helps to know a man named Enzo G. It’s a thrilling and over-the-top spectacle, in the mind of 70-year-old Australian director George Miller. “Mad Max: Fury Road” exploded onto screens this weekend in plumes of cherry red and saffron yellow smoke, with swarms of chalk-dusted bodies coiling on monstrous vehicles the color of dried blood.

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