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Jawnts: Go back to the apocalypse in the original 'Mad Max'

Summer blockbuster season is upon us. As Philadelphia becomes a sweltering hellscape, the wise will regularly escape into the darkened, air-conditioned recesses of the nearest movie theater, absorb a gallon of soda, and watch the world explode.

Summer blockbuster season is upon us. As Philadelphia becomes a sweltering hellscape, the wise will regularly escape into the darkened, air-conditioned recesses of the nearest movie theater, absorb a gallon of soda, and watch the world explode.

This summer, like its predecessors, is studded with releases of comic-book films and rehashed legacy cinema. The critics who have to watch this stuff for a living are easily wearied by such fare, but even most of them are singing the praises of Mad Max: Fury Road. In the age of computer-generated mayhem, there is a winning novelty to seeing actual people defy death and actual cars blow up.

This entry in the series comes 30 years after the last Mad Max installment and cost four times more than the budgets of the three other movies combined - $150 million well spent, if you like visually stunning two-hour-long car chases.

To see where it all began, it's worth rewinding to the original scrappy, low-budget movie starring a fresh-faced, prefame Mel Gibson. The 1979 Mad Max is coming to a big screen Friday at the strikingly refurbished old-school theater in Ambler.

Made for a mere $2 million, and devoid of the totally whacked-out villains of the later films, the first Mad Max depicts a world on the brink of apocalypse. Something has happened - it's never clear what - but civilization is still struggling along and the barbarians are simply marauding around, not yet running the show.

The movie isn't freighted with much of the portentous environmental dread that haunts the later films, which are beset by a very 1970s fear of scarcity, but it does have actual emotional stakes. Gibson's Max has a best friend and a family (his wife is beautiful in a real-person sort of way, unlike the supermodels who inhabit Fury Road). The thrills often come less from fiery car crashes than from suspenseful sequences where the fate of his loved ones hangs in the balance.

The screening at the Ambler, 108 E. Butler Ave., is at 11:30 p.m. - and only $5. So it might be possible to catch an early showing of Fury Road at your local multiplex and then drive as though pursued by a crazed motorcycle gang to watch Gibson in action.

What better way to celebrate the coming of summer?