Tom Hardy as the titular character of Mad Max: Fury Road. Photograph: Jasin Boland/AP

Quentin Tarantino has always been something of a fanboy flapjaw, happily swapping his auteur status for that of a gushing cinephile. And in director Mark Hartley’s 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!, broaching the subject of Australian road films, Tarantino’s analysis was characteristically – perhaps, mildly disturbingly – enthusiastic.

“Nobody shoots a car the way Aussies do,” he said. “They manage to shoot cars with this fetishistic lens that just makes you want to jerk off.”

With that in mind, even the staunchest Tarantino fan would not have wanted to be within a hundred miles of the guy yesterday when he was presumably one of a squillion others to watch the new teaser trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road.

Starring Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron, the film is a belated fourth instalment to the 70s/80s franchise that made a star of Mel Gibson and effectively launched the career of director George Miller. The trailer is a two-and-a-half minute molotov cocktail of screams and squeals, crammed to the hilt with explosions, screeching tyres, world-gone-to-hell voiceovers and futuristic-looking warriors in bondage outfits stomping across sunbaked desert.

Just 10 days after the Daily Dot ran an op-ed quite rightly arguing teaser trailers have become Hollywood’s version of clickbait – promising the world and delivering nothing – here was one that came through with the goods, big time. Pundits lunged to their keyboards to describe it, as if a nuclear bomb had just gone off in their backyard.

Gushing headlines arranged combinations of words such as “roars into life”, “bonkers”, “raises hell”, “insanely awesome” and – vaguely in line with Tarantino’s threat of a reduction in body fluids – “will make you shit yourself”. In less than two days the video on YouTube has clocked up 4m views and counting.

The hotshot editor who cobbled that bad boy together is no doubt basking in the cyber sunshine of viral success, and good on them. It is a mean pastiche of footage set to a taser-to-the-butt rhythm and filled with denotations of virtually every variety: aesthetic, literal, emotional, intellectual. Perhaps the most impressive part of the Fury Road teaser is that its hell-for-leather tone seems to be tuned to the same frequency as its cinematic ancestry. These are movies made more than three decades ago and which all these years later are still gobsmackingly frenetic.

Ten seconds into the trailer there’s a low angle POV shot of a dusty road filmed extremely close to the ground. To a Mad Max aficionado that image will resonate more than Tom Hardy rotating in front of backgrounds bulging with speeding vehicles and fireballs, because it evokes memories of the originals. Four-and-a-half minutes into the running time of 1981’s brilliant Mad Max II: Road Warrior, the frame is similarly poised just above the bitumen. This is Mad Max through and through: breathlessly street level and visceral, all about the ride and the roar, the audience as voyeurs hanging onto the edge of the tow bar.

It’s been a long time between drinks but Fury Road provides many reasons to get excited. For one thing, Miller has never dropped his game since first hitting the road in 1979. In the roughly three-and-a-half decades since, he’s directed only nine standalone feature films and never lost his visual verve. Even, perhaps especially, when dabbling with very different subject matter, a la Happy Feet one and Two and his criminally under-appreciated 1998 experiment Babe: Pig in the City. When that loveable pork chop returned for a sequel, visiting an imaginary Vienna-like city where ostracised animals take on the allegorical equivalent of asylum seekers, his adventures were so dark and weird the film sunk virtually without a trace.

Mad Max: Fury Road, which the director has been trying to get off the ground for over a decade, will likely be a smash hit. What does this mean for the Australian film industry? Firstly, it’s a reminder that this is our movie mostly in spirit. With a budget believed to be around US$150m, Australian cinema simply doesn’t finance films that expensive (let’s call it a co-production).

It also wasn’t shot here. Following extensive campaigning from former NSW premier Nathan Rees, Fury Road was supposed to be filmed in Broken Hill but after a deluge of rain the damn desert started sprouting flowers. Production was moved to Namibia, where Miller was ultimately accused of pulverising an ancient ecosystem.

But that’s not to understate the film’s significance, symbolic or otherwise, for Australian cinema. The Mad Max trilogy helped put Australia on the map as a place where crazy-good genre films could be made fearlessly, encapsulating the psychological essence of the Ozploitation movement: that any nut could make an entertaining movie if they came up with an interesting idea and threw their heart and soul into it.

Say what you like about audience share of Australian films at the local box office, but that spirit refuses to die, evident in recent productions as varied as Jennifer Kent’s psychological creepy crawly The Babadook to the Spierig brothers’ time travel sci-fi Predestination.

Max is partly to thank for this madness. When he finally returns, reincarnated with the body of Tom Hardy, he may not come with a smile on his face, but audiences will surely leave with one.

Mad Max: Fury Road is due for release mid-2015