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Hasta La Vista, Baby: Post-Apocalyptic Cinema
Atomic Anxiety
As discussed in Chapter science-fiction films of the 1950s tended to address the post–World War II fears of the atom bomb through fantastical means. Radioactive fallout was to blame for the giant ants of The Incredible Shrinking and Godzilla and all his associates from Japanese cinema. Films dealing head-on with the potential real-life consequences of a nuclear holocaust, on the other hand, were few and far between. The first such movie was 1951’s an independent production written, produced, and directed by Arch Oboler.
Oboler had made his name in radio drama, earning great acclaim for his work on the horror anthology series Lights (Oboler wrote the famous episode Chicken which later became the basis of a Bill Cosby comedy routine.) Unfortunately, the talky and visually undistinguished Five suggests that Oboler should have stuck to radio. The film’s title refers to the five survivors of a nuclear holocaust who happen to congregate at the same small house on a hill. They represent a cross-section of society: a tour guide from New York, a pregnant housewife, an elderly banker, a working-class black man, and a haughty adventurer. Will they take this apocalyptic opportunity to form a new society, free of the fears and prejudices that proved so destructive, or is it human nature that they make all the same mistakes again?
For all its dramatic deficiencies, Five should be credited (or blamed) for providing a template that’s still the default setting for post-apocalyptic drama more than six decades later. As has so often been the case, Roger Corman was the first to tap the premise for its exploitation potential, with one of his earliest efforts as a producer and director, 1955’s Day the World “I tried to make it something of a psychological study of a small group of people thrown together under unusual circ*mstances,” Corman wrote in his memoir. But in truth, the movie plays more like Corman saw Five and thought, “Well, that’s not bad, but wouldn’t it be better if a radioactive, three-eyed mutant showed up halfway through?” This is why he’s a national treasure, folks.
Required reading for anyone who attended high school between the Cuban Missile Crisis and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On the Beach depicted the aftermath of a nuclear war in grim, hopeless detail. (It’s telling that this book kept being foisted on each successive generation, as if to say, “Well, we’ve utterly failed to solve this problem! Maybe we can scare you youngsters into doing something about it.”) Inevitably, the king of the message movies, Stanley Kramer, adapted On the Beach for film in 1959.
As Kramer’s film opens, an atomic war has seemingly wiped out life everywhere on the planet, save Australia and New Zealand. An American nuclear submarine commanded by Gregory Peck arrives in Melbourne, whose residents are living on borrowed time; sooner or later, the deadly cloud of radioactive fallout will reach its shores. The clock is ticking, but Kramer’s film lacks all urgency, opting instead for standard Hollywood melodrama. Peck becomes embroiled in a love triangle with floozy Ava Gardner and scientist/drunkard/race car enthusiast Fred Astaire, while young sailor Anthony Perkins agonizes over abandoning his family in order to fulfill his military obligations. On the Beach has its isolated highlights, as in an emotional sequence wherein a crewman abandons ship in San Francisco Bay in order to spend his final days in the irradiated shell of his boyhood home, but for the most part, it’s dreary soap opera right up until its admittedly powerful final moments.
Ultimately, On the Beach is a story of denial—of people going through the motions of their ordinary lives, long past the point of no return. Despite its fatalistic narrative arc, it’s almost absurdly optimistic in its belief that human beings will continue to conduct themselves in accordance with societal norms after it all breaks down. In sharp contrast, 1962’s Panic in Year Zero! depicts the rapid unraveling of the social fabric in the wake of a nuclear attack on the United States. Directed by Ray Milland, who also stars as a patriarch who will stop at nothing to keep his family secure, Panic is a taut, nasty little piece of work that would ultimately prove far more influential than its big-budget Hollywood counterpart. Later post-apocalyptic films will use the genre to explore what happens when all the rules have gone by the wayside. When civilization as we know it disintegrates, what social order (or disorder) rises in its wake?
The Dystopian Seventies
The political turbulence and social upheaval of the late 1960s was not immediately reflected in the mainstream movie making of the day. Hollywood is always slow to respond to cultural change, and it took the unexpected success of the independently produced Easy Rider to get the studio suits to notice the whiff of revolution in the air. As had been the case in the 1950s, science fiction proved an ideal medium for exploring the sort of “What if?” scenarios that the changing times churned up in the popular imagination.
Having single-handedly finished off the planet of apes (or so he thought), Charlton Heston signed on for another post-apocalyptic outing in The Omega director Boris Sagal’s 1971 adaptation of the Richard Matheson novel I Am Matheson’s story had already reached the screen once before, in the 1964 Vincent Price vehicle The Last Man on A key influence on George Romero’s Night of the Living that film starred Price as a scientist who survives a plague that has turned the rest of humanity into slow-moving (and slow-witted) vampires. Although initially successful at establishing an eerie mood, Last Man is ultimately undone by its budget deficiencies and the ridiculous ease with which its weak antagonists are defeated.
Omega Man takes a different approach, one far removed from anything Matheson could have envisioned when writing the novel. Here, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles is the final battleground in the war between The Man (embodied, of course, by square-jawed NRA spokesman Heston) and the counterculture (represented by the plague victims—black-robed albino hippies and Black Panther types, echoing the Manson cult by calling themselves “The Family”). Having survived the plague thanks to an experimental vaccine, Heston’s Dr. Robert Neville whiles away his days attending repeat screenings of where he mockingly mouths along with the hippie platitudes expressed from the stage, and holes up at night in a penthouse apartment decorated in the finest early ’70s swank. He is the one percent… or, more accurately, the .00001 percent.
He’s not completely alone among the living, however, and the film takes a weird swerve toward conciliation when Neville hooks up with an Angela Davis lookalike who leads a small band of survivors. Interracial romance was still an onscreen rarity at the time, so credit the movie with progressive intent on at least one front, but this pairing is so unlikely, it could only happen if they were the last two people on Earth. Which, of course, they basically are. (Heston would revisit the dystopian realm of science fiction again in 1973’s Soylent playing a detective in an overpopulated future New York. This rather dull procedural is best known for its climactic and much-parodied revelation that “soylent green is people.”)
Odd as The Omega Man is (and it’s pretty much the ideal movie for bleary-eyed channel surfers to stumble upon at 2:00 a.m.), it pales in comparison to the lunacy unleashed in A Boy and His Based on a novella by Harlan Ellison (there he is again), and directed by L. Q. Jones, best known for his acting in the films of Sam Peckinpah, this 1975 cult film is both hugely influential and one of a kind. First, the influential part: A Boy and His Dog is the first of the post-apocalyptic films to appropriate the iconography of the western—which makes sense, given the director’s background in oaters. The lone wanderer of the wilderness, the roving gangs preying on the weak, the makeshift settlements sprouting out of the desert landscape—all of these elements would have enormous impact on The Road Warrior and, by extension, its many imitators.
It’s in the particulars of its story that A Boy and His Dog carves out its own inimitable niche in the post-apocalyptic landscape. Vic (a youthful Don Johnson) roams the devastated American wasteland of 2024, nearly two decades after the nuclear holocaust of World War IV. Despite his baby face, however, Vic is no innocent; he seeks only food, shelter, and women to rape. He is accompanied in his quest by his dog Blood, who communicates with him telepathically. Blood is clearly the brains of the outfit, a point made explicitly clear when Vic ignores the dog’s pleading and follows a woman with whom he is smitten into “Down Under.” This underground society is a perversion of small-town ’50s America, where everyone wears whiteface and decisions of life and death are made by a three-person committee. Vic is informed that he’s been led there in order to impregnate the women, which strikes him as a fine idea until he is hooked up to a milking mechanism designed to forcibly extract his sperm. While attempting to escape, he encounters an overalls-clad enforcer robot nearly as unstoppable as the Terminator.
Consistently bizarre and only occasionally repellent, A Boy and His Dog is one of the most twisted, original visions of the apocalyptic future ever realized on film, despite the fact that it was made on a very small budget, with few special effects and minimal production design. By contrast, 1976’s Logan’s Run was a major studio release and one of the most lavish sci-fi productions of the Wars era. Directed by Michael Anderson, the film was based on a 1967 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, which drew inspiration from the youth movement of its era in its depiction of a future dystopian society.
In the novel, the sit-ins and protests of the 1960s sired a youth-dominated society, one that gained the force of law once overpopulation raged out of control. By 2116, a maximum age of twenty-one is being enforced by officers known as Sandmen, who are charged with hunting down and killing runners—those who have failed to comply with the mandatory death sentence. One of these Sandmen, Logan 3, becomes a runner himself in order to infiltrate the underground network helping runners to escape, but when he falls for fellow runner Jessica 6, he abandons his mission for the cause of his own survival. The novel is a briskly paced read that uses its chase structure to unveil the layers of a beguiling future world, and is highly recommended.
In the 1976 film, the maximum age was raised to thirty in order to facilitate casting, most notably Michael York as Logan and Jenny Agutter as Jessica. An opening title card informs us that in the twenty-third century, “survivors of war, overpopulation and pollution are living in a great domed city, sealed away from the forgotten world outside.” Here mankind lives only for pleasure, and the powerful central Computer provides all. In another fuzzy-minded change from the book, those who have reached the age of thirty participate in “Carousel”, a sort of Cirque du Soleil act that supposedly provides the opportunity for “renewal” but in practice seems to result only in people exploding.
Otherwise, the first half of the film is a reasonably faithful adaptation of the book, and particularly enjoyable for fans of retro ’70s futurism. Predominantly shot in a Fort Worth shopping mall, the domed city of Logan’s Run spruces up the usual gleaming white corridors of the future with a bedizened disco-ball aesthetic. Like the visuals, the pulsing synth score by Jerry Goldsmith occupies the intersection of creepy and cheesy, and while the special effects tend to be clunky, they, too, possess a certain vintage charm. (The android Box, a fearsome Terminator-like cyborg in the novel, here becomes Roscoe Lee Browne in a rolling tube of tinfoil, extolling the virtues of “fish, and plankton, and sea greens, and protein from the sea.”)
Once Logan and Jessica make their escape from the domed city, the movie departs from its source material and loses its way. While the novel postulates a sort of underground railroad for runners leading to an actual Sanctuary—an abandoned space station near Mars—the movie offers Peter Ustinov as a doddering old man surrounded by his cats in the ruins of Washington, D.C. Given that this foolish character is the first exposure Logan and Jessica have ever had to a person over thirty, it’s unclear why the idea of growing older would continue to have any appeal to them. Nevertheless, Logan returns to the domed city, where he uses the Captain Kirk “logic bomb” technique to confuse the almighty Computer and free the citizens from their pampered lives of luxury. How these people who have had their every need catered to all their lives are going to survive longer than a week in the wild is anybody’s guess.
Dawn of the Romero’s Zombie Apocalypse
Of course, Logan’s Run wasn’t the only post-apocalyptic ’70s movie filmed primarily inside a shopping mall. George Romero hadn’t planned to make a sequel to his seminal zombie film Night of the Living but an idea came to him while taking a tour of the then-new Monroeville Mall near his home base of Pittsburgh. Part-owner Mark Mason showed Romero some behind-the-scenes areas of the mall, including hidden rooms stocked with civil-defense supplies. When Mason offhandedly remarked that a hermit could survive a long time hidden away in there, Romero’s thoughts turned back to the living dead.
In the mid- to late 1970s, large indoor shopping centers weren’t nearly as ubiquitous as they would become (which is probably why Logan’s Run could get away with using one as the city of the future), but Romero saw potential in the setting for a consumerist satire in the guise of a horror movie. As Dawn begins, the zombie epidemic that began in Night of the Living Dead is now starting to completely overwhelm society’s ability to control it. Two surviving members of a SWAT team sent into a tenement swarming with the living dead decide they’ve had enough, and plan to escape the city in a helicopter along with its pilot and his girlfriend. After passing over countryside teeming with zombies (along with redneck hunters whooping it up as they blast holes in the living dead-heads), the chopper sets down on the roof of the Monroeville Mall.
The four survivors set up camp inside the civil-defense area of the mall, then set about clearing the shopping center of all its zombie inhabitants and sealing off all the entrances. Once they’ve established the mall as a safe zone, it becomes their own personal playground, as they begin to enact a simulation of real life within its walls. Ignoring the problem works for only so long, but it is telling that it’s not zombies but other people (in the form of a marauding biker gang) who represent the real threat to their security.
In contrast to the stark black-and-white horrors of Night of the Living Romero adopts an admittedly comic-bookish tone for employing garish colors and cranking up the comedic aspects of his scenario. That’s not to say the violence has been toned down—heads explode, intestines are spilled, and flesh is ripped and devoured at regular intervals—but the emphasis here is less on sustained terror than on social commentary. Far from being dated, Romero’s satire is probably more relevant now than at the time of the movie’s release. These days, you hardly need Romero’s help if you want to see hordes of mindless zombies overrunning shopping malls; recent years have seen news reports of “Black Friday” consumer mob violence that could easily be mistaken for outtakes from
It should be noted that there’s nothing heavy-handed about Romero’s satiric approach here; on one level, the mall is simply an amusing and colorful location for a zombie takeover. At one point, the director stages a sort of slapstick ballet set to Muzak, as the living dead tumble down escalators, trip over furniture, and fall face-first into the fountain. But despite these lighthearted moments, Dawn never loses its undercurrent of dread and pervasive sense of loss as civilization is stripped away, leaving only its material residue behind.
Romero would complete his original Living Dead trilogy with 1985’s Day of the but as it turned out, that was only the beginning. It took a while, but eventually “zombie apocalypse” became a genre unto itself, spawning such films as 28 Days and Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the The AMC network, home of prestige fare like Mad Men and Breaking adapted Robert Kirkman’s Romero-influenced comic book The Walking Dead as a weekly television series and saw it become a pop-culture phenomenon. Romero got back in the game, as the man who started it all directed three more Living Dead installments: Land of the Diary of the and Survival of the The Max Brooks novel World War Z became a bestseller destined for the big screen, and even the Centers for Disease Control got in on the action, releasing a preparedness guide to the zombie apocalypse. That last item might have been tongue-in-cheek (or, in zombie terms, tongue-through-cheek), but its underlying purpose was deadly serious. While an actual zombie apocalypse might be a long shot, the threat of a devastating worldwide pandemic is always lurking.
The Doomsday à la King
George Romero originally intended to follow up Dawn of the Dead with an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1978 novel The In fact, the first paperback edition of the book carried a line on the cover reading, “Soon to be a major motion picture directed by George Romero.” The development phase of the project dragged on throughout the ’80s, with King himself churning out a 400-page script at one point, but the same problem kept cropping up: the book simply had too much story for a single motion picture to handle at a reasonable running time.
After finishing The King had begun work on a roman à clef about the Patty Hearst kidnapping, but, in a rarity for the prolific author, he was making no headway. One day he read a news report about a chemical/biological warfare test that went awry in Utah, killing many sheep in the process. “But,” King wrote in his breezy survey of the horror genre, Danse “the news article stated, if the wind had been blowing the other way, the good people of Salt Lake City might have gotten a very nasty surprise.” The incident reminded him of a post-apocalyptic novel by George R. Stewart called The Earth in which much of the Earth’s population was killed off by a virulent disease. King felt Stewart’s book got too bogged down in ecological issues, but the basic premise stuck with him. He shifted his focus to a new novel, which began with a strain of superflu known as “Captain Trips” wiping out 99.4% of the Earth’s population.
The first section of the book follows the spread of the virus, which begins when a soldier escapes from a quarantined army base where a biological weapon is being tested. In the second section, the few survivors are drawn to one of two outposts of humanity: the “Free Zone” of Boulder, Colorado, where the followers of saintly Mother Abigail congregate, and city of sin Las Vegas, where the minions of “Dark Man” Randall Flagg conspire. The final section details the confrontation between these two factions, which, like many of King’s early works, builds to a literally explosive finale.
The first of King’s epic-length novels, and the one most deserving of the doorstop-sized treatment, The Stand has proven to be one of the most influential works of the last half century. Its high-stakes battle of good and evil was an oft-acknowledged inspiration for producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof in their plotting of the cult hit series and the many post-apocalyptic series that followed (see sidebar) certainly took their cue from King’s magnum opus. The 2010 bestseller The by Justin Cronin, is unimaginable without the King novel.
The George Romero version of The Stand will forever remain one of those mythical lost projects, like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune or David Lynch’s Return of the In 1994, a TV miniseries based on The Stand aired on ABC, and although it had its moments (notably the opening sequence cued to Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper”), the network version was inevitably watered down and disappointing. In 2011, it was announced that actor/director Ben Affleck would tackle a new big-screen version of The Stand for Warner Bros.
The Day Cold War Nightmares of the Reagan Age
In the early to mid-1980s, nuclear paranoia reached a level unseen since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in 1979, setting the stage for a heightening of tensions between the two superpowers. The 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, a hard-line Cold Warrior who would refer to the USSR as “the Evil Empire” in speeches, only intensified the frightening possibility of global thermonuclear warfare. Even purple party-pop star Prince was singing, “Everybody’s got a bomb, we could all die any day.” The overwhelming sense of helplessness in the face of potential destruction is perhaps one reason The Terminator struck such a chord in 1984. Here was a story in which an ordinary person could make a difference and potentially avert disaster. Few other apocalypse-themed works of the time were as optimistic.
On a November night in 1983, one of the largest American television audiences of all time—nearly 100 million total viewers—tuned into the ABC network to watch a movie of the week unlike any other. Written by television veteran Edward Hume and directed by Nicholas Meyer After The Day After depicted a nuclear attack and its aftermath through the prism of Lawrence, Kansas. The cast included Jason Robards, JoBeth Williams, John Lithgow, and Steve Guttenberg (a long way from Police
Although ABC had originally intended to air the film over two nights, they made the decision to condense it into a single evening’s viewing by airing it without commercial interruption following the nuclear attack. (Apparently at least one wise executive realized that viewers wouldn’t be in the mood to see the Ty-D-Bol Man after witnessing such cataclysmic destruction.) The original airing of the film was followed by a studio discussion that included Dr. Carl Sagan, Henry Kissinger, and Robert McNamara.
The Day After was undoubtedly a one-of-a-kind television event and may have even had a positive impact on U.S. policy. After watching the inaugural airing, Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary, “It’s very effective and left me greatly depressed.” Hollywood veteran Reagan was always strongly influenced by movies, and many believe his viewing of The Day After played a role in his signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in Reykjavík three years later. If there’s any truth to that, then The Day After certainly succeeded as a polemic, as well as a cultural event. Whether it actually succeeds as drama is another matter.
Seen today, the movie is perhaps inevitably tainted with the trappings of its time. For its first hour it plays very much like a standard ’80s movie of the week, and while this may have worked in its favor at the time (lulling people into a state of complacency before whacking them over the head), now it just feels dated. The same goes for the special effects during the attack scene, most notably the cheesy “x-ray” flashes used to depict people being vaporized by the bomb. The idyllic heartland imagery of the first hour, with its churches and ball fields and families playing horseshoes, is so overstated as to be corny. Still, The Day After was never really intended to be judged on the usual aesthetic terms; it set out to make a point, and did so successfully.
Appearing nearly simultaneously with The Day After was originally produced for PBS but accorded a small theatrical run at the end of 1983. In fact, “the PBS version of The Day is probably the best shorthand way to describe the gentle domestic apocalypse that unfolds in Lynne Littman’s film takes place in the fictional San Francisco suburb of Hamlin, which is initially undamaged when the bombs fall. (Our only sight of the nuclear holocaust is a bright flash of light through the curtains of a living room window.) Littman’s focus is on a mother (Jane Alexander) left to raise her children alone for whatever weeks of their lives remain, after her husband (William Devane) is killed in the blast. The external factors may not be starkly realistic, but the emotional turmoil is vividly felt, and Littman brings a rare but welcome feminine perspective to the issue.
For a take on the subject that pulls absolutely no punches, look no further than a 1984 BBC telefilm that makes The Day After look like a Disney cartoon. Unsparingly bleak and brutal, Threads was partially inspired by The War a pseudo-documentary that director Peter Watkins had made for the BBC in 1965. Although the BBC had approved Watkins’ script, they refused to show the completed film, which went unaired for two decades. Written by Barry Hines and directed by Mick Jackson, Threads incorporates elements of Watkins’ documentary style with kitchen-sink realism to tell a story that runs along parallel lines with The Day to startlingly more gut-wrenching effect. It’s a brilliant film that’s impossible to imagine watching more than once.
While The Day After unfolds in the American Midwest, setting up a stark contrast between pre-nuclear pastoral idyll and post-nuclear wreckage, Threads is centered on Sheffield, an industrial outpost in Northern England that, at least in the early 1980s, already exuded an air of bombed-out despair. The run-up to the nuclear attack plays out in the background, on televisions, radios, and newspaper headlines, as a young working-class couple deals with the seemingly life-and-death issue of an unexpected pregnancy. The film’s scope expands outward (the “threads” of the title are those of the social fabric) as the clock winds to zero hour and the nukes reduce the city to rubble. With pitiless clarity, Threads traces the progression of events, from initial radioactive fallout to nuclear winter to the near-medieval civilization existing more than a decade after the attack. The Day After ends with the joyful birth of a newborn and Jason Robards getting a hug. Threads also ends with a birth, but the baby is deformed and stillborn. The only mercy shown by the filmmakers is to freeze the frame and cut to black before the mother’s shriek of horror.
Those who are not quite up for such a harrowing experience may want to check out the 1982 documentary The Atomic Cafe instead. Made up entirely of newsreel footage and archival clips from government and military films, and scored to some of the catchiest atomic-themed ditties of the ’40s and ’50s, Cafe takes a rather cheeky approach to showcasing the horrors of the nuclear age. By juxtaposing the apocalyptic images of actual bomb tests and the after-effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts with laughably inadequate instructional films, this documentary by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, and Pierce Rafferty exposes the unbreachable gulf between the destructive power of our weapons and the banal platitudes we employ to feel better about them. This is how we learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.
The Road Warrior and Other Wanderers of the Wasteland
George Miller’s debut feature Mad Max arrived in 1979 as part of a wave of colorful and creative drive-in pictures produced in Australia. (These films have collectively come to be known as “Ozploitation,” and you can learn more about them in the terrifically entertaining retrospective documentary Not Quite Miller’s film was a nasty little revenge thriller set in a vaguely dystopian future, starring a then-unknown Mel Gibson (whose name would become practically synonymous with “revenge thrillers” before it became synonymous with “crazy off-screen behavior”). The movie’s high-octane automotive carnage helped make it the highest-grossing movie ever in Australia at the time of its release, but Mad Max did nothing in America, partially thanks to a crude and unnecessary dubbing job that gave the perfectly understandable English-speaking characters goofy American accents.
Mad Max remains an exciting B movie, but even its hardcore fans must have been flabbergasted by the upgrades Miller made for its sequel two years later. Mad Max took place in a world that could best be described as pre-apocalyptic; the civilization it depicted was on the brink and beset by lawlessness, but it was still a civilization. Mad Max 2 (known as The Road Warrior in the United States, where the Mad Max name carried no weight at the time) opens with a narrator informing us that “two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all.” What remains, as far as we can see, is an every-man-for-himself wasteland, where fuel is the most scarce and desired of commodities.
Miller renders this future world as a masterful pop-art collision of spaghetti western landscapes, ’70s gearhead-movie energy, and punk-rock style. As mentioned above, The Road borrows liberally from A Boy and His but it borrows from a dozen other pop-culture influences, as well, from Kurosawa to Corman to comic books, distilling them all into one of the freshest, most exhilarating action pictures of all time. Miller keeps dialogue to a bare minimum, preferring to tell the story in purely visual terms whenever possible. (Gibson has the same number of lines of dialogue as Schwarzenegger in the first sixteen.) For pure kinetic energy, its chase sequences are unparalleled, but The Road Warrior is also notable for the compelling post-apocalyptic world it depicts—a world that would prove enormously influential on a number of filmmakers, including James Cameron. The junkyard aesthetic of the post-apocalyptic scenes in The Terminator owes a debt to Miller’s work, one that Cameron has acknowledged. “[W]hen I was writing The The Road Warrior came out, and I said, ‘This is the next step.’”
Kevin Costner certainly must have wished he’d played Mad Max, as he twice attempted to replicate The Road both times with disastrous results. Waterworld let the makers of Ishtar off the hook by becoming Hollywood’s new shorthand for a runaway project doomed to box-office failure in 1995, while The Postman was virtually ignored two years later. Similar “wanderer of the wasteland” knockoffs continue to show up every so often in theaters, with 2010’s The Book of starring Denzel Washington, being one of the more recent examples. One that might be of interest to fans of both Mad Max and the Terminator is 1990’s the debut feature from music-video director Richard Stanley. As was often the case with filmmakers making the transition from MTV to the big screen, Stanley proves better at crafting stylized eye candy than a coherent narrative, but Stacey Travis is eminently watchable as a woman who discovers her hidden resources of strength and ingenuity while battling a seemingly unstoppable killer robot. (Sound familiar?)
George Miller himself returned to the post-apocalyptic world he’d created in 1985’s Mad Max Beyond although this time he was only one of two credited directors. Miller primarily stuck to directing the action sequences, while George Ogilvie handled the dramatic scenes. Perhaps because of this split, Thunderdome is at its best in the early scenes set in the frontier outpost Bartertown, and in the chase sequence that ends the picture. As we’ve learned with the Terminator, however, no good sci-fi franchise ever really dies; it just goes dormant for a while. As of 2012, the long-delayed fourth Mad Max film, Fury was finally set to go before the cameras, with Tom Hardy taking over the lead role. It’s said to be the first film in a new trilogy, but, as always, the box office will have the final say on that matter.
Apocalypse How? Five Offbeat Ends of the World as We Know It
Gas-s-s-s experimental gas escapes from a chemical research facility in Alaska, killing everyone on Earth over the age of twenty-five. Director Roger Corman described this fractured, DayGlo picaresque as a “Strangelovian comedy,” but as its counterculture protagonists find themselves reenacting atrocities from American history in increasingly absurd fashion, it plays more like drive-in Godard. Inextricably tied to its time, Gas-s-s-s is still goofy, groovy fun and would make a great double bill with…
Glen and Randa McBride Holzman’s directed this obscurity from the waning days of the hippie era, set one generation after the fall of civilization (presumably due to nuclear war, as a mushroom cloud is prominently featured in the promotional artwork). The young, hairy, and oft-nude inhabitants of this world that nature has begun to reclaim must rely on artifacts like Rolling Stones records and Wonder Woman comics for their knowledge of how the world works, while the few remaining older people are either craven opportunists or harmless nutjobs. Rudy Wurlitzer, who seemingly had a hand in every counterculture-themed movie of the late ’60s and early ’70s, contributed to the screenplay of this uneven but worthwhile effort.
Quintet it to Robert Altman to concoct the least appealing post-apocalyptic society this side of Set in a future Ice Age, Quintet is so white with snow and glare, you will notice hitherto imperceptible streaks of dust on your television screen. The remaining inhabitants of this dreary age reside in the ruins of some sort of sewage treatment plant or perhaps trendy industrial-style disco, and spend their spare time playing the bizarre and deadly game (invented by Altman) that gives the film its title. The game itself doesn’t look like all that much fun, but since there’s not much else to do besides club seals or freeze to death and get eaten by dogs, everyone plays it continuously anyway. Quintet certainly isn’t one of Altman’s classics, but those with a fondness for the director’s weirder side (e.g., Three will want to give it a try.
Night of the Comet the Earth passes through the tail of a comet, most of the population is reduced to red dust. Survivors partially exposed to the comet are slowly turning into zombies, hunting the very few who were completely shielded from the rays, including teenage sisters Regina (Catherine Mary Stewart) and Samantha (Kelli Maroney). Writer/director Thom Eberhardt’s cult favorite is pitched somewhere between Valley Girl and Repo Man on the scale of ’80s New Wave comedies. Awash in pink neon, bad fashion, and chirpy synth-pop tunes on the soundtrack, it’s undeniably a relic of its time, but that only adds to its goofy appeal.
The Rapture biblical apocalypse has often figured into films aimed at a Christian audience, like The Omega Code and Left but Michael Tolkin’s directorial debut is something else entirely. Mimi Rogers gives a career-best performance as a deadened directory-assistance operator who fills her spiritual void with a swinging sex life until her yearning for something more meaningful leads her to a religious conversion. Tolkin’s film appears to be a psychological study of the dangers of fanaticism, until its final moments bring a literal Judgment Day, complete with the Four Horsem*n of the Apocalypse. As in his uniquely disturbing novel Among the Tolkin finds original ways to unsettle and provoke at every turn.
Apocalyptic Television
Post-apocalyptic scenarios occasionally figured into episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer but for most of television history, the end of the world was not the stuff of weekly family-hour entertainment. One major exception aired from 1975 to 1977 on the BBC, which was certainly more likely to give such dark material a shot than the American television networks of the time. Survivors was conceived and written by Terry Nation, a BBC veteran best known for creating the Daleks on Doctor The setup for the series is quickly dispatched in the opening-credits sequence, which depicts a Chinese scientist accidentally spilling a sample of a deadly virus, which he then spreads through his travels. As the opening episode, “The Fourth Horseman,” begins, the pandemic is spreading throughout England and presumably the rest of the world. By the end of the first hour, it appears that only a handful of survivors remain in the London area. In subsequent episodes, Nation tackles the question of what sort of society will rise in the wake of the apocalypse, with one group striving to establish a self-sufficient agrarian commune of sorts, while another attempts to impose a totalitarian law-and-order regime.
Nation departed after the first year, but the series continued for two more seasons and was remade by the BBC in 2008. Aside from the rather dire Showtime series however, post-apocalyptic television didn’t really catch on as a trend until after the success of ABC’s While Lost was not itself post-apocalyptic (although many fans initially theorized it might have been), it established that many of the tropes associated with post-apocalyptic fiction—survivalism, a disparate group of characters attempting to build a new society, the group splintering into factions—could translate to an ongoing television story.
Among the first wave of TV series to hit the airwaves was CBS’s set in a fictional Kansas town of the same name. In the pilot episode, Jake Green (Skeet Ulrich) returns to his hometown of Jericho, having left five years earlier following a blow-up with his father. Shortly after his arrival, the United States is attacked with nuclear weapons, and Jericho effectively becomes cut off from the rest of the world. The first season mixed soap opera–style relationship storylines with more action-oriented survival drama, culminating in the discovery of another town of survivors, which ultimately declares war on Jericho. CBS initially canceled Jericho after the first season, citing declining ratings, but the show’s fans rallied on the Internet, persuading the network to order an abbreviated second season of seven episodes. The second season focused on a repressive provisional government taking over Jericho and transforming it into a police state. ratings got even worse in its return to the airwaves, and the series was canceled for good. (A “season three” of sorts does exist in comic book form.)
The most successful post-apocalyptic television series from a ratings standpoint is AMC’s The Walking Based on the comic books by Robert Kirkman and produced by Shawshank Redemption director Frank Darabont (at least until he left the series under mysterious circ*mstances between seasons one and two), the show draws heavily on George Romero’s “living dead” mythology in its depiction of life in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. The story concerns a small-town Georgia deputy (Andrew Lincoln) who wakes from a coma after being shot in the line of duty and finds himself in a world overrun with flesh-eating “walkers.” After catching up with a band of survivors, including his wife (Sarah Wayne Callies), son (Chandler Riggs), and former partner (Jon Bernthal), he leads them on a quest for survival, in hopes of finding some remnant of civilization safe from the walking dead. After a strong start, The Walking Dead has begun to show the limitations of ongoing series set in the post-apocalypse, as its second season slowly bogged down into a morass of static situations and unlikable characters. It ratings remained strong, however, suggesting that television is far from finished exploring post-apocalyptic scenarios.
Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the (Universal Pictures/Photofest)
