Large numbers of movies get released and make no money. The traditional indie counter-manoeuvre is to spend no money making the movie in the first place.

Mad Max was such a movie, and the result is a classic. The series really finds its voice with The Road Warrior, but the first one is good, too – an edgy and stylish movie that combines a peak oil-induced apocalypse with Australian muscle car culture.

The setting is familiar, and the Mad Max franchise made it that way. Civilisation is winding down due to depleted fuel reserves, and road gangs have turned the roads into battlefields. Max Rockatansky is an officer in the collapsing house of cards that is the local police force, and he’s getting uncomfortably happy with the violence his job requires. When a fellow officer is burned alive in an ambush, he begins a transformation into a vigilante who doesn’t just throw away the rulebook, he does wheelies over it with his supercharged Pursuit Special.

After an energetic opening scene that hurls cars around and showcases the series’ love of outrageous trash talk (Ayatolla of Rock and Rolla, etc), Max hits its stride: a gritty and atmospheric movie with solid writing and acting. Considering the budget, the action scenes are impressive and occasionally spectacular – but the thing that really brings this movie together is the characters.

Gibson is particularly good. He’s calm, but it’s a calm that makes you uncomfortable. He seems like a benign cloud cell that could mutate into a hurricane. He doesn’t overact – far from it, he’s usually quieter than he needs to be. But he has a strange power over the screen, and his quietness is part of what makes the final scene so chilling.

There’s a bunch of crazy desperadoes with ridiculous names like Mudguts and Toecutter, and they’re also handled with a nuance that isn’t typical in this kind of movie. I like how Nightrider goes from insane tirades to tears, and Johnny tries to escape Max’s vengeance by claiming mental problems. The villains have a nice bit of…humanity, which reminds us that Max himself might not be too far behind.

Max isn’t perfect. As an emotional experience it has an odd plateau-like quality, and it lacks a big epic scene like the road chase of the second movie or the Thunderdome battle of the third. The music hasn’t aged too well. Mad Max has an ill-fitting jaunty score that makes me think of Adam West punching out bad guys with “WHAM!” and “POW!” appearing on the screen.

But the movie is still impressive for what it is. Few films do so much with so little money (imagine if Blair Witch had car stunts), and it’s influence etc cannot be overstated. The odd thing about Max is that you’ve witnessed its spirit even if you haven’t seen the movie, because so many of its ideas have seeped into the work of other directors.

This DVD contains over four hours of pure autism, and is essential viewing for all Chris-chan fans (just so long as you’re not a JERK).

Although it was distributed in 2007 among a few select friends and family members, Chris intended this DVD to be mass-released at some point. He mentions in his Future Message that he thought the DVD would eventually be shown in schools. You see, Chris believed he is a special person, one worthy of great fame and recognition…and, as history has shown, he was absolutely correct.

The oldest piece of film is from 1994, when Chris was 12, and documents him winning some local sweepstakes thing. This video can be considered definitive proof that Chris is not a joke or a character. He talks to the camera like a shell-shocked PTSD victim, and the reporter mentions that he has high functioning autism.

The next video is from 1998, with Chris reading a poem in high school. “My peer relationship is low, and my loneliness is off the scale.” He soon wanders off topic, and starts talking about school life in general. The video ends with Chris raging and shrieking like demon-possessed Regan because he got bad marks in English.

Then we’ve got a pile of tedious videos of Chris playing videogames. There’s a news segment from 1999, when Pokemon was huge, that shows Chris playing the trading card game with kids half his age and generally taking it all rather seriously.

Then there’s Chris singing his cover of The Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way”, with lyrics about how he’s searching for a girlfriend.

And so on, and so forth…it’s endearing and rather moving to see Chris’s mind at work. I wonder what it must feel like to have such a world-view that 5 minute clips of you playing videogames seem like professional DVD-worthy content. Honestly, it would feel awesome.

This guy’s feedback mechanisms are broken in the best way possible. Everything he does is perfect. Every comic he draws is a masterpiece. Every game he beats gives him the rush normal people get from climbing Everest. Being Chris is like being a rat, pulling a lever, and having six pounds of Gorgonzola fall on your head.

The longest part of the video is a two hour slideshow of Chris’s art, comics, and photography. The soundtrack is provided by Chris’s “radio station” KCWC, which means I hope you like videogame OSTs and 90s pop songs. Apparently Chris has a master copy of this DVD that goes for six hours.

Chris is a legend in his own mind. And mine, too.

There’s a lot to like about Genocyber. It’s edgy, it’s violent, and it has a great atmosphere. But like so many OVAs, the weight is all in the packaging. Any dissection or analysis of this anime reveals there’s really not a lot at its center.

The plot looks deep and engaging at first, but almost immediately you realise it’s a ripoff of a ripoff of a ripoff. Blah blah siblings with a psychic link blah blah huge robot mechas blah blah shadowy government agents blah blah climactic transformation scene blah blah city blows up the end. The characters are mostly just stock, including the usual assortment of evil scientists and masked henchmen and a gang of street thugs lifted right out of Akira.

If you don’t care much about story, Genocyber works. It evokes a nasty and brutal atmosphere, and the thematic confusion could be interpreted as acute psychological depth. It worked for Neon Genesis Evangelion, after all. The animation is punchy and colourful, with a few CGI moments mixed in here and there. On the whole it’s hard not to be impressed by Genocyber‘s aesthetics and style, even if the content side of the anime comes up short. As with Ohata Koichi’s previous work MD Geist, the gore factor is comically high. One scene in the middle gets so outrageous and excessive that it borders on being comedic. The final battle ends with all of Hong Kong destroyed.

Things get hard to follow. Genocyber is confusing, bombastic, and over-the-top. In a way, it’s almost like its own characters, in that it’s cataclysmically fucked in the head and deserves to be in a room with padded walls. This is a definitive example of 90s anime, both the good and bad. The English dubbing sucks ass, by the way.