A few days ago, while searching for something interesting to watch on Netflix I stumbled across a movie I had managed to have never heard of. This, despite the fact that it has several actors I know and like and is definitely the kind of story that I like. Last Night is the debut film by the Canadian writer/director/actor Don McKellar, and is set during the last six hours before the literal end of the world. An unspecified disaster, which has apparently been known about for at least several months, is going to kill every last human being on the planet at the stroke of midnight (Eastern time). The story follows a small group of characters whose stories interweave over the course of their final half-dozen hours of existence.



The cast includes Sandra Oh, Sarah Polley (she was the little girl in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, but you would probably...

In 1965, the powerful documentary filmmaker Peter Watkins made the amazing “Culloden” – a documentary about the 1746 Jacobite uprising, done in the style of the Vietnam War reporting being done at the time. The docudrama was widely praised and went on to win a BAFTA award for its innovative style. Following on that success, his next project was intended to be aired as a documentary special airing on the 20th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. The War Game was presented as a documentary detailing the events leading up to and then following a nuclear attack on Britain by the Soviet Union. Before it could be aired, however, it was pulled from release by the BBC because it was deemed “…too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.”



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Published in 2010, The Passage is the first book of a planned trilogy by Justin Cronin. The novel spent nearly two months on the New York Times bestseller list, and more importantly my wife really liked it and suggested that I should read it. In broad strokes the story is about a secret government experiment that is attempting to create super-soldiers but instead unleashes a virus that ultimately destroys civilization (at least in North America, we are never given any glimpse of the wider world so it is unknown whether or not the infection was contained). The twelve initial test subjects, all death row inmates who were offered the removal of their death sentence in exchange for participating in the experiment, become in effect vampires. One tenth of their victims also become lesser vampires, powerful enough to hunt mankind nearly to extinction and yet under the thrall of whichever of The Twelve is the original...

Unless you are living under a rock without an internet connection (and if you are, how in the heck are you reading this), you almost certainly know that yesterday, January 18, 2012, was a large-scale internet protest against the proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation in the United States congress. Many major websites, including Wikipedia and Reddit, went dark for the day and instead served up messages asking  American citizens to contact their representatives to oppose the proposed laws. JamesAxler.com joined in that protest, and I feel like today I owe you an explanation as to why. First off, let me say categorically that piracy is bad. If you are downloading pirated music, movies, and other media then you are a bad person and you should feel bad. I am familiar with the lame arguments that people give to justify their actions, but they are simply that - justifications. More germane to this website, if you are downloading pirated copies of books published by Gold Eagle then you are doing nothing but harming the...

This Christmas my very excellent wife gave me (among other things) a copy of More Brains! A Return to the Living Dead, which is billed as "the definitive Return of the Living Dead documentary. Last night I finally had some time to sit down and watch it. It's pretty much two hours of talking heads, and given this wasn't a cursed production like Apocalypse Now the documentary really won't be interesting to anyone who is not already a ROTLD fan. But if you are a fan, there's some interesting material here. For me, Return of the Living Dead was a seminal event in my teenage years. It came out in the summer of 1995 just before I started my senior year in high school. I was a big fan of horror films in general and zombie films in particular (my favorite at the time was Lucio Fulci's 'Zombie', mostly because I had not yet seen Romero's Dawn of the Dead). I vividly remember the drive down to Seattle to see ROTLD in the theater, blaring the Ramones' cover of "Needles and Pins" on the stereo and itching to see what Dan O'Bannon had in store for me. I was not disappointed, and to this day one of my favorite moments in cinematic history is the zombie picking up the radio in the ambulance and telling the dispatcher to "..send more paramedics!"...

After four consecutive weeks of writing about movies, I thought it was time to get back to some white-knuckle post-apocalyptic literature. Published in 2007, Plague Year by Jeff Carlson is the first book in a trilogy about a nanotech machine plague that nearly wipes out humanity and forces the few remaining survivors up onto the mountain tops in order to stay above the invisible sea of death. As one group of survivors struggles to stay alive in the High Sierras in California, a team of researches on the International Space Station races to find some kind of cure or vaccine. Meanwhile a civil war is brewing within the US government, now relocated to Leadville, Colorado in the heights of the Rocky Mountains.

As post-apocalyptic thrillers go, this book is a little more outside my normal comfort zone. It is very much a techno-thriller, with much detail given to the mechanics of the Machine Plague. The nano-virus...

Generally speaking, my primary experience with French cinema has been the “magical reality” movies of Jean-Pierre Jeunet (and his very excellent Delicatessen is very much on my list of movies to review for this blog). Between that, and movies like Mr. Bean’s Vacation (which may be a British film but it is set almost entirely in France) and The Triplets of Belleville (easily one of my favorite animated films of the last decade), when I think of French films I almost exclusively think of happy, funny, whimsical and lighthearted comedy. Now, it’s not that I expected to actually see that kind of style in a zombie movie -- I knew when I started watching The Horde a few days ago that I was watching...

Back when I started this blog, I wrote to my friend Michael Montoure (whose work you can read over at Bloodletters.com) to ask for his help with a logo. The design brief I gave him was "every bad knockoff of The Road Warrior that was ever filmed in the desert on a non-existent budget", and I think we can all agree that he delivered beautifully on that précis. I was reminded of that this week as I watched a movie that fits that description perfectly: Patrick Swayse’s magnum opus Steel Dawn.

Yes, he is the desert warrior…

Back in 2007, before he was cast in the lead for the Star Trek reboot, Chris Pine was in a little independent post-apocalyptic virus film called Carriers. It sat in a can for two years until one presumes the distributers of the movie realized that they could maybe make a little extra cash off of Captain Kirk and got Carriers into a limited theatrical release. I stumbled across it on Netflix a while back, and although I entered into it with low expectations I was actually pretty impressed.

The story follows four young adults in the aftermath of a global pandemic.  Brian (Chris Pine), his girlfriend Bobby, his brother Danny, and his brother’s friend Kate are trying to reach Turtle Beach where they think they can wait in safety for the virus to die out. They have survived so far primarily because Brian has a very rigid set of rules they must follow in order to stay uninfected. These aren’t lighthearted Zombieland-type rules, but rather very strict and...

So, a little while back when I was reading Lucifer’s Hammer I considered doing a month-long series of blog posts on various post-apocalyptic stories surrounding a world-killing meteorite. I didn’t really want to write a post on Armageddon, though, both because it is obvious and because it would mean I would have to actually watch it again and I am just not that dedicated. (Sorry Michael Bay, no matter how pretty Liv Tyler is to look at I just can’t sit through another one of your overblown steaming piles of cinematic crap). I wanted to dig a letter deeper, and on a whim I tried searching Netflix for Meteor – a true classic of 70’s excess with Sean Connery and Natalie Wood. Sadly, Netflix did not have it available. Also sadly, I instead stumbled across Meteor Apocalypse....