Mad Max 2

The sequel that swallowed its own genre. Max, now a burnt-out drifter in a fully collapsed world, helps a fuel-rich settlement escape a marauder army, and the whole film builds to a tanker chase that has never been bettered for real vehicular carnage.

George Miller invented an entire post-apocalyptic visual language here, the leather, the mohawks, the scavenged cars, and every Italian post-nuke film on this site spent the decade copying it. The stunts are real and terrifying.

The rare sequel that eclipses the original and defines a genre.