Features

To Live and Die in LA (1985)
To Live and Die in LA is an Eighties cop film that takes the pastel-pushing consumerism of its contemporary, Miami Vice, to a suitably nasty conclusion.

This is Gordon Gekko's Eighties we're living in here, where ambition becomes greed becomes corruption, and where every character has been breathing the air for too long to escape with much merit. As part of the rising frenzy of the action, the director William Friedkin wanted a chase sequence as electrifying as the one he created in The French Connection, 14 years before.

He certainly achieved it, although it took a total of six weeks to film. There are also rumours that they were among the last scenes shot, so if anything unfortunate happened to the actors they wouldn't have to be replaced. Just as with The French Connection, it's the visceral nature of the chase that provides the drama.

In Chance and Vukovich, the cops being pursued, the panic is palpable as they weave between HGVs and fork-lift trucks. They sweat, their eyes dart nervously to the rear-view mirror, the steering wheel is tugged left and right with manic urgency.

Some time later, John Pankow, who played Vukovich, met up with an undercover NYPD cop who told him that this scene was the most accurate and realistic a depiction of such a situation he'd ever come across.

Mad Max (1979)
It wasn't until The Blair Witch Project came along that Mad Max was knocked off its perch as the film with the highest profit-to-cost ratio in history.

It cost around $300,000 ($15,000 of which went to the unknown lead, Mel Gibson) yet went on to pocket over $100 million worldwide. This feat of alchemy was achieved by combining a bleak, dystopian Outback of the near future with anarchic biker gangs on the rampage and a fresh-faced Max Rockatansky out for revenge.

Max's weapon of choice is a Ford Falcon, a car about as familiar on Aussie roads at the time as the Granada would have been in the UK. Except this car was put into make-up and came out looking like an Essex-modder's dream, complete with a V8 engine that sounded like an earthquake.

Known in the movie as the 'Pursuit Special', it's since become part of Australian folklore, a piece of auto-exotica with the cult status of a Bond car, albeit sporting the abrasive, unreconstructed characteristics of its Antipodean progenitors.

Because of budget restraints, many of the cars were re-used, often sent haring down highways with their new paint jobs still drying. Not that you'd notice, or even care, when you've got a film packed with some of the most white-knuckle chase sequences ever put on celluloid.