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...

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....

I have been reading The Walking Dead comic book series since issue #6. So, not quite there from the very beginning but definitely on board long before it became a huge media sensation. When I heard it was going to become a TV series I was both nervous and optimistic, and after seeing the pilot last year I was very pleased. (Unfortunately, since the pilot the show has never lived up to that same quality. But I am still enjoying it for the most part.). With the ongoing success of the comic, which is on target to hit an amazing issue #100 in 2012, and with the huge success of the television series, Robert Kirkman has decided to begin producing a series of novels that will flesh out the back story of major characters in the comic. The first to be released is The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga.

In reviewing the book, I need to look at it from two different...

In the last 14 entries I have written a lot about apocalypse via nuclear warfare, as well a couple by zombie and a few random other causes. This week, I am here to talk about another major sub-genre of apocalyptica: the world-ending meteor strike. Back in the late 90's there was the pair of meteor movies, Armageddon and Deep Impact, but the real giant of the genre is the 1997 novel Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Lucifer's Hammer very rightfully won the Hugo Award in 1978 for Best Novel, and it earned that award by being simultaneously compulsively readable and scientifically accurate. Although a little slow to start, as it introduces its large cast of characters, once meteor actually hits (about 150 pages in) the book becomes a non-stop series of action set pieces and survival tales. Niven and Pournelle are both known for being hard science fiction writers, and there is quite a bit...

In my last post I wrote about what is considered one of the landmark Japanese animated films, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. It is the movie that cemented Hayao Miyazaki as a true genius, and coincidentally was also the movie that first got me into anime. Well, actually, that’s not quite true. The movie that I saw, the one that sparked my interest, was actually the bastardized English translation called Warriors of the Wind. Obviously, enough of the original move shone through such that I became a fan, but I was soon to discover just how much got lost in the translation.

Warriors of the Wind was produced by New World Pictures, dubbed into English and released briefly theatrically and then later shown on HBO and released on video tape. The movie was heavily edited for time, entire plot threads were removed, and worse than that the entire point of the movie was excised. Where Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was a grand ecological statement, Warriors of the Wind has virtually nothing to say on the point. Characters were randomly renamed (from Nausicaa to Princess Zondra, from Asbel to Prince Milo, etc.). In the main subplot about the Ohmu, they are changed from sentient sympathetic creatures into nothing but aggressive monsters. It is a tragedy from start to finish.

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Last week I talked about the anime masterpiece Tenshi no Tamago. This week I have the sad duty to report on the hostility done to that very excellent move by it’s American translation, In the Aftermath: Angels Never Sleep. This is going to be a short one, because this movie doesn’t deserve much consideration.



So what happens when a shlock genre studio like New World Pictures gets the license for a deeply mysterious and beautiful masterpiece like Tenshi no Tamago? Naturally, they delete everything but about 30 minutes of the animation, and then wrap it all in a live action story filmed in and around an abandoned California refinery with a cast of people who have never acted in another movie (before or since) and shoot in on what appears to be a budget of $25 plus a bubble gum wrapper.

The earth is a wasteland. Scavengers wander around in full body haz-mat suits with gas masks, because the air is too polluted to breathe. Meanwhile off...

Sit back, boys and girls, I’m going a bit surreal this week. This is one of my all-time favorite movies – beautiful, hypnotic, surreal, and cryptic all rolled up into a gorgeous anime package. I discovered Mamoru Oshii’s “Angel’s Egg” quite by accident back in early 1986, and therein lies a tale.



In early 1986 I attended Rustycon with my best friend Riff, and spent a fair amount of time in a room that was showing non-stop Japanese animated films. I got to talking to the guy who was running the room, and ultimately a few weeks later he gave me a videotape copy of Tezuka’s “Phoenix 2772”. As an afterthought, because there was space at the end of the tape, he also tossed in “Angel’s Egg” because he thought it was pretty cool.  Twenty five years later and I can’t say that I have ever given Phoenix 2772 another thought, but “Angel’s Egg” has stuck with me.

At that point in time,...

In 2009 Charlie Higson (author of the very excellent Young James Bond book series), began a brand new series with The Enemy. Set in London a year after a global pandemic has infected everyone over the age of sixteen, turning them into flesh-eating ghouls, the first book follows a group of surviving children as they travel through the city to try to reach Buckingham Palace which they have been told is a safe  haven. A secondary plotline follows one small child who has been separated from the group as he travels from Arsenal Stadium and through the London Underground trying to catch up with the rest of the group. At 384 pages, this is a very quick and action-packed read.



The first challenge in any Young Adult novel is how to separate the children from the adults. The whole raison d'être for the genre is to empower the youthful protagonists such that they have to make their own decisions, so the parents have to be taken out of the picture with some kind of plot contrivance. With The Enemy, Higson takes that idea to the extreme by not just taking the parents away but by actually turning them into cannibalistic horrors that will literally devour the children.

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“…ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars…For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows…Now the brother shall betray the brother to death, and the father the son; and children shall rise up against their parents, and shall cause them to be put to death…No flesh shall be spared…”

- Mark 13:7,8,12,20

In September of 1990 a nasty little British film came out that was equal parts post-apocalyptic, science fiction, and horror. Hardware is a bleak, grimy, operatic and ultimately bloody and painful piece of work, and achieves all of its goals beautifully.

A few weeks ago when I was prepping my columns on A Canticle for Leibowitz and Alas, Babylon I kept encountering references for a third book from that era, On the Beach by Nevil Shute. Somehow, despite a lifetime love of post-apocalyptic fiction, I had never previously heard of this classic novel. Originally published in 1957, it was followed by a very successful film adaptation in 1959 starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and a very young Anthony Perkins. It was adapted again in 2000 for a 3 hour television mini-series on Showtime, and in 2008 as a radio drama broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as a part of their Classic Serial series. After coming across references to it so many times, I knew I had to pick up a copy and read it for myself.

The story takes place primarily in Melbourne, Australia roughly a year after a nuclear war had devastated the northern hemisphere. The nuclear fallout had killed all human and animal life above the equator, but the equatorial pressure zone had kept the...

In the mid-1980’s in America the Cold War was at its peak and there was a huge resurgence in post-apocalyptic fiction. The Road Warrior burned up the box office in 1982, William Johnstone’s Ashes series was selling briskly along with at least a dozen other survivalist series, and Gold Eagle was ready to jump into that market. They already published several popular men’s fiction series like The Executioner and Mack Bolan – now they were looking for something to cater to the booming post-apocalyptic marketplace.

As recounted in the excellent supplementary material in the back of Deathlands: Encounter, author Jack Adrian (a.k.a. Christopher Lowder) presented a series proposal that mixed the concept of a nuclear-blasted post-apocalyptic America with strong science fiction elements in the existence of top-secret government bunkers with matter-transfer units that would allow the lead characters to teleport from place to place. In his proposal, the protagonists would battle against despotic warlords (or “Barons”),...

So, I had originally intended to write a Deathlands retrospective this week. I still plan on doing that next week. But I just got home from seeing Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and suddenly that became my topic of the week. I went to the movie expecting a fun Planet of the Apes movie, and instead what I got was a genuinely smart, well-written and well-acted science fiction film. Yes, there were plenty of nods to the original movie, but it really stands completely on its own. If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favor and go. You won’t regret it.

The premise of the film is that Will Rodman (played by James Franco) is a research scientist trying to create a cure for Alzheimer's. Not coincidentally, his own father (played perfectly by John Lithgow) suffers from the disease, and is the primary motivator for the research. Through an unfortunate chain of events, Rodman winds up taking home an infant chimpanzee who has genetically inherited the traits from the treatment he was testing. Caesar is raised...

1959 was a landmark year for post-apocalyptic fiction. Two of the greatest novels of the genre were published that year. Last week I wrote about the first, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. and this week I am following up with Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. Where Leibowitz is a novel of ideas and follows the epic scale of mankind’s long crawl out of (and back into) oblivion, Alas, Babylon is is a novel grounded in stark immediate realities. In fact, Alas, Babylon is widely considered to be the first post-apocalyptic survivalist novel. The story focuses entirely on the events leading up to and immediately after a nuclear holocaust, and what it takes for a small community to survive in the aftermath.

1959 was a landmark year for post-apocalyptic fiction. Two of the greatest novels of the genre were published that year, and so for the next two weeks I am going to discuss them. In fact, the book I am writing about today is not only one of the finest examples of post-apocalyptic literature ever produced, I actually consider it to be one of the greatest American novels of any genre. I have read it several times over the years, and I always discover something new each time.

One of my all-time favorite cult films is this 1998 gem that mashes up Mad Max, The Wizard of Oz, Russian-American Rock and Roll, and 1970’s Hong Kong cinema. I give you: Six-String Samurai

The premise of the movie, as given during the opening credits, is that in 1957 the Russians used nuclear force to invade and conquer the United States. In the vast wasteland that resulted, only one place remained as the last bastion of freedom – a city that became known as Lost Vegas, where Elvis was crowned as King. Forty years later Elvis is dead, and now Vegas needs a new King.

Writer Terry Nation is probably best know as the creator of the Daleks, the most popular recurring monsters on the television show Doctor Who. First appearing in the second ever storyline in the series, the Daleks (and by extension, Terry Nation) were responsible for a huge ratings success on the BBC and spawned a national craze in the United Kingdom. A decade later Terry Nation created a new series for the BBC called “Survivors” which ran for three seasons from 1975 – 1978. The storyline followed a small group of people who survive a plague that kills most of the Earth’s population.



The Logo for the original series

In the original series (which unfortunately I have never seen, but would be keen to watch), the story begins with the mysterious pandemic and then gradually builds a cast of characters who eventually group together to try to build a new...

"Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your own home."
- Caveat to Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

It must have been about the spring of 1991 when I found myself in my favorite book shop at Pike Place Market in Seattle. At the time I was really into signed hardcover copies of genre books, and this particular shop carried some really cool limited edition items. Things like the two volume slipcase edition of The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub, or the really sweet original editions of Clive Barker's Books of Blood. That particular day the thing that caught my eye was a signed British first edition of Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophesies of Agnes Nutter, Witch.