Strange Dreams

This is my entry in the Secret Places and Trippy Houses Blogathon hosted by Taking Up Room

 

 

 

Alone at night in the shadows of my room,

I drift inside of a magical view.

Strange dreams invade my sleep at night! 

 

"Strange Dreams" by Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush 

 

Your dreams are the realm of fantasy. In your dreams you can be an amazing superhero, saving the world just by wagging your pinky finger. Or you can be the cock of the walk, getting the best looking girl (or guy, as the case may be...) in town. Those are what we might call "good" dreams.

 

On the other side of the coin you could be haunted by some pretty bizarre circumstances. Who among us hasn't had a dream where you were caught at school in your pajamas, or underwear, or even naked in front of your classmates? That is just a mild nightmare, as far as nightmares go. A few years ago I related a story about dreaming that flying monkeys were out to get me after watching The Wizard of Oz on TV. (A Nightmare in Oz) 

 

But the nightmares that  haunt some people are even more devastating. Again, on a personal note, I have dreamed, on several occasions of being in a terrible accident, usually while driving. To have nightmares where your actions within the dream sequence not only affect you, but also affect others, can be a cause of distress.  

 

Take for instance the dream of a world leader. God only knows what kind of sick dreams a wacko like Adolph Hitler or Kim Jong Un had or has.  But even world leaders who have some semblance of rationality, such as the President of the United States, can be a bit off kilter.  In this movie the President, played by Eddie Albert, is still holding on to a tenuous hold on rationality, but is still plagued by a recurring nightmare.

Dreamscape is a film that sometimes seems to be unsure of what it wants to be.  Is it a horror movie? (Some scenes may just scare the pants off of you).  Is it a science-fiction movie? (The idea of being able to enter the dreams of another person and interact with them is the stuff of geek sci-fi fantasy). Is it a political thriller? (The main baddie has some ulterior motives for his trying to get the President some help with his nightmares). There is even a not-so-subtle romance going on in the movie, so a case could be made for a romance movie. To top it off, the movie poster (see below) clearly tried to make a connection to the adventure film, a la Indiana Jones, although there is not much in it that could remind you of that adventure type of movie...

Besides the focal "star" of the film, (and, at this point, Dennis Quaid was just getting started, since he had only a few big roles under his belt by this time, Tough Enough, Jaws 3D and The Right Stuff, and had still not achieved the "familiar face" status he would later get), you also got some superstar talent in the form of Max von Sydow and Christopher Plummer, as well as Kate Capshaw, who had just earlier this year gained some recognition for her role in the second Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The highlight of the film, for me, though, was David Patrick Kelly, who had a few years prior made his film debut in what will probably end up being his most memorable role, as Luther in The Warriors.  

Additionally, there was also George Wendt ("Norm" from Cheers), who throughout the 80's got parts as subsidiary characters in films, and Peter Jason, whose name may not be familiar, but his face surely will be if you watched many 80's movies (in particular, he was the leader of the resistance movement in They Live and was also the bartender who was the recipient of the classic line delivered by Eddie Murphy in 48 Hrs... ""There's a new sheriff in town.. and his name is Reggie Hammond!") .  

Dreamscape came out in 1984 and faced the daunting competition of  such blockbusters as Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Fortunately the studios didn't actually try to pit it against those monster moneymakers:  The early summer gave the public the big guys, and let Dreamscape have the luxury of coming to the big screen in late August. It still had the opportunity to have a semi-decent draw, garnering $12 million against a (astoundingly) low budget of $6 million. (The movie LOOKS like it costs more than that, since the special effects are pretty decent...) Note: Elsewhere I have read that the producer claims ticket sales reached upwards of $25 million, take that as you will.

 

 

 

 

Dreamscape (1984):

A key recurring theme in the 80's (and beyond) is that anytime there are potential psychics involved in the story, there is ALWAYS some secret government group seeking to have control over these talented individuals. It was true in Firestarter, and it is true here also. At the beginning of the movie, Bob Blair (Christopher Plummer) is discussing with Dr. Paul Novotny (Max von Sydow), pointing out that a former associate of Novotny's, Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid), is just the sort of man that Blair is looking for for his project.  The project at hand is a program that purports to use psychics to enter the dreams/nightmares of patients at the institute to help them overcome the nightmares that plague them.

 

Blair wants a good talented psychic to help relieve the President of the United States (Edward Albert) deal with a recurring nightmare he has been having about causing the coming of World War III.  But Blair's motives are not altruistic. See the President (whose name is never given, but at one point he is called "John") is determined to go to a Geneva Peace Conference and try to negotiate a disarmament or at least a reduction in the available nuclear weapons stash of the country. See, the President is not only haunted by thoughts of an imminent nuclear war, but he is still dealing with the trauma of his recently deceased wife. (Thus his wife plays a prominent role in his nightmare as she is frantically running from the blast of an exploded nuclear weapon).

 

Blair, the essence of a "hawk" thinks this is a bad idea. And, as it turns out later, his plan is to kill the President in his dreams. This would have the effect of killing the President in real life, because it is established that if you die in your dreams, you die in real life, too.

But Alex has skipped out of the limelight, living basically in the shadows, using his psychic abilities to win at gambling.  When bookies show up to wrangle him into helping them Alex is not very receptive. But when some guys from his former boss's institute show up Alex uses the opportunity to escape from the bookie and his henchmen. But, when it turns out that Alex finds out his newly acquired saviors intend to basically "kidnap" him for Novotny's program, he is not entirely all that gung ho about it. Even when he finds out they intend to try to use him in the dream scheme. 

That is, until he meets Dr. Novotny's colleague, Dr. Jane DeVries (Kate Capshaw). Alex is, among other things, a womanizer (and with Capshaw as his new potential conquest, who could blame him...?) So he agrees to hang on for just a little bit longer. At least until he can get Jane to agree to a romantic interlude...

 

Blair's prize psychic is Tommy Ray Glatman (David Patrick Kelly). Tommy Ray is the ultimate in "I'm just in this for myself" kind of thinking. It turns out that Tommy Ray is not entirely as innocent as anyone may think. Alex eventually finds a file in the offices of Blair that reveal that Tommy Ray had killed his own father.

   

As usual, when the government has it's hand in the pie, it turns out that not all is what it seems, even though Blair manages to put up a front to keep the secret agenda hidden away from Alex as well as Novotny and Jane. Before we get to that final combat in the nightmare of the President, however, we get to see Alex work his magic at helping a young boy overcome is nightmare of a boogeyman, Or, in this instance, a snake man... (By the way, the kid is played by Cory Yothers, whose sister had a bit more success in Hollywood, mainly by playing the younger sister of Alex Keaton in Family Ties).

There is also a pretty funny sequence where Alex helps out a man who is having trouble with his sex life with his wife. It turns out that he is haunted by his own "nightmare". I won't give this part away because a: it's well worth seeing on screen and b: it's just too funny to describe anyway.

Alex and Jane end up together in a dream she is having, but since Alex entered the dream without her knowing about it first, or even her acquiescence, she is understandably a bit annoyed with Alex. But she had an attraction to Alex in the first place, so she is not all that incensed by his intrusion. (Unlike other bloggers I am not going to address the non-PC issue that this scene might be looked at in today's world. I try to look at movies in the context of the time they were made, not whether they would fly today).

Alex meets up with a writer of potboilers, Charlie Prince (George Wendt), who is investigating the mysterious goings on at the institute, and eventually turns Alex on to the fact that Blair may not be all the altruistic figure he seems to be trying to promote himself as.

 

Most of the dream sequences are a bit on the low budget side (that snake man, for instance, is not really all that scary, just made more so by the music accompanying the scenes). But, considering, the time, they are pretty decent. I found out in doing research that the low quality of the dream sequences was due to the fact that the producers underestimated the time they would need. Apparently, they thought 2 months would be plenty of time. Imagine what they could have accomplished if they had given themselves at least double that... 

Ultimately, the best sequence is the final scene in which Alex and The President have to fend off Tommy Ray, who as I mentioned earlier is Blair's number one boy for dispatching the President. 

The post holocaust scenes in the President's nightmare, although not much different from any other post-nuclear war scenes depicted in movies and TV shows down through the ages, can be pretty nerve-wracking, and were probably even more so during the mid-80's when the threat of nuclear war with the Russians still loomed on the horizon. And here that filter that the camera man uses to give it an odd unworldly feel of the dream world makes the scene work all that much better.

A note here about the content: Red Dawn, which had been released earlier in 1984, was the first movie to ever receive the newly created PG13 rating, movies that weren't too graphic in other areas, but might be to violent for a standard PG rating. Dreamscape became the second. You parents with small children might keep that in consideration...  

If you decide to take the leap in to the dream world of this movie, I don't think you'll be disappointed. When I originally saw it in the theater back in 1984, I think I would have given the film an 8 rating. Here, in the retrospect of the past, and having seen many more films with an apocalyptic scene or two, made much better due to a bigger budget, I would be remiss to say it didn't drop a peg or two, but I think I could still rate it a 7.

Well, time to fire up the old Plymouth and head back home. Drive safely.

Quiggy

 

 

 

 

Standing Tall in the Face of Disaster

This is my entry in the Disaster Blogathon hosted by Dubsism and Me

Stephen King has been off and on one of my favorite authors.  (I published a blog piece last year on how he influenced me, which you can read here.)  One of my favorite novels of his is The Stand, which was published way back in 1978.  In the summer of 1984 I had a job as a security guard in a manufacturing plant.  Since my main duties were to watch out for the computer room (this being back in the days when computers took up whole rooms and probably had less processing power than your current smart phone, but were extremely valuable), I had a lot of free time.  One of the books I read that summer was the original publication of The Stand.

In 1990, twelve years after the publication of the original, King brought out the "Complete and Uncut" edition of the book, in which he included much of the stuff that his publishers had forced him to leave out.  (Apparently, according to his preface, the publishers balked at releasing a 1200 page manuscript by a relatively new author and forced him to reduce it to a more manageable 800 page book, still a big book for a fledgling author, but compare that to the average book King puts out today.)

Was King a psychic?  The current spread of the Coronavirus is not near as devastating a disaster as the one described in the book, but one can't help but think of the current situation in the world today if one reads the book's first part (or watches part one of this miniseries).  Note: I would be less than honest if I did not tell you that King himself has recently tried to distance himself from comparisons of the "Super Flu" or "Captain Trips" described in The Stand from the current virus.  But when this blogathon idea first came to my attention back in November, it was the first film I thought of, and now it seems almost prescient that I chose it.

The book and film are both, by necessity, America-centric.  King himself, in the novel, never really delved into what happened in the rest of the world after he outbreak of the "Super-Flu".  Maybe the same thing happens in Russia and China and the rest of the world in some fashion. To be sure it's hard to imagine that some people didn't take the Super-flu with them outside of the continental United States.  That is the only flaw I see in the story however. 

The Stand (1994):

The whole thing starts with a mistake.  OK, so its not really all that much of a mistake.  The US military and the government have been working to create a lethal virus, ostensibly to be used in warfare.  But it is a series of mistakes and mishaps that gets it out into the open.  A mishap inside the military compound releases the virus and a security guard at the gate is told to shut down the complex.  But instead he panics and goes back to his home and gathers up his wfe and baby and hightails it before the override security can shut the gates.

Thus the beginning starts not with a bang but a whimper.   The next time we see the guard is when he crashes his car into a gas station in a podunk town in Texas, where Stu Redman (Gary Sinise) and some assorted friends hang out.  The guard's wife and baby are already dead from the virus and the guard himself is not long for this world.  But he has been spreading the virus everywhere, including Hap's Gas Station where Stu and friends are hanging out.  Eventually Stu and the entire town are packed up and taken to a government facility, not necessarily with their consent.

Not long afterward the virus is everywhere.  In Manhattan, Larry Underwood (Adam Storke) arrives to visit his mother.  He recently left home to become a singer in Los Angeles, but he has overspent his advancement and has gone home to escape  his creditors.  And in rural Maine Frannie Goldsmith (Molly Ringwald)is helping her father who has come down with the disease.  Eventually only she and her nebbish admirer Harold Lauder (Corin Nemec) are survivors in the town.  Into this cast of characters is also cast Nick Andros (Rob Lowe), a deaf mute who is stuck in rural Arkansas after being attacked by a gang of hoodlums.

On the other side, there is a malcontent named Lloyd Henreid (Miguel Ferrer) who has been jailed after a foiled holdup in which his partner killed the store owner.  Lloyd's partner is killed, but Lloyd ends up in prison as an accessory.  There is also a character known only as Trashcan Man (Matt Frewer), an arsonist who likes setting fires to things.

With 98% of the population dead from the virus, the survivors are called by superior powers (God and the Devil, or what have you).  The good guys feel themselves being called to rural Nebraska where an elderly black lady, Abigail Freemantle (Ruby Dee) is the instrument of good calling them to her.

On the opposite side is Randall Flagg (Jamey Sheridan) (who may or may not be the embodiment of the Biblical Antichrist, calling the not so good guys to Sin City, Las Vegas.

The second part of the movie involves the gathering of these assorted characters.  Nick meets up with a good but retarded man named Tom Cullen (Bill Fagerbakke).  Frannie and Harold eventuall hook up with Stu and an older man Stu encountered, Glen Bateman (Ray Walston).  All are being haunted by dreams of both Abigail who is calling to them and Randall who scares the shit out of them.

Eventually the good guys end up having to move to classier digs, since after all there's not much room for them all at Abigail's home/farm, and they pack up to move to Denver, where the rest of whats left of the good guys end up meeting them.

While both sides try to recreate society in their own way, the good guys eventually have to come to the conclusion that the Las Vegas contingent isn't going to sit on their haunches and expect a mutual piece.  What happens next constitutes the second two parts of the movie. Even though the good guys would like to coexist with the bad guys and have it be let each other alone, they know the truth that Flagg and Co. are not going to let it be such a mutual co-existence.

There are some traitors among the good guys, as to be expected.  And eventually the Denver group decides to send spies to see what's going on.  But Flagg is a bit more cognizant of their intentions than they would like to believe.

The movie as made takes a few liberties with the text.  After all, even at a 6 hour running time (it was made into a 4 part serial), some stuff had to be condensed to make it manageable.  And it should be noted that there is not much from the "unexpurgated" version that made it to the film; it's primary source is the original 800 page version.  The good thing is Stephen King had a hand in writing the script, so it stays pretty true to the book (unlike some other films I could name... Lawnmower Man anyone...?)

The cast includes a lot of familiar faces.  Even the author gets a brief cameo.

Watching The Stand may be hard on anyone who has lost friends or loved ones during the current situation.  At least the first act.  But the story is rather intriguing.  And it may or may not encourage conspiracy theorists on their views of the government,  (Again, especially in the first act).  One thing.  I rarely cry when watching movies, but if you watch it I will tell you that the scene in which Kathy Bates makes a cameo caused me to well up immensely.And not necessarily because she dies.  It's more of the circumstances surrounding her death.  You have to watch the scene to relate.  It has to do with my being such a strong advocate of free speech.

Time to head home, folks.  Drive safely.

Quiggy

Chaos in the Outback

This is my second entry in the Blizzard of Oz Blogathon hosted by Me

Earlier in this blogathon I intimated that my first entry, Strictly Ballroom, was not really, in general, my type of movie.  Many of you may already know this, but for those of you new to the blog I'll map out what IS my type of movie.

Science fiction.  Cars.  Explosions.  Guns.  Chaos.  To wit, the average "man cave" movie.

The Road Warrior  was one of the first movies I saw in the theater after I turned the age of consent and could go to any damn movie I wanted to without my parents' permission.  I really had no idea what to expect.  Although it is a sequel to Mad Max, a 1979 Australian film directed by George Miller, it was promoted initially as an independent feature.  Meaning I had no knowledge of the first movie when I went to see The Road Warrior, and it wasn't even promoted as Mad Max 2, at least not in the United States.

It was also my introduction to Mel Gibson.  His star had yet to rise in the U.S. (that would come later), but he had been around for a few years.  Credit could probably be given to George Miller for his "discovery", however.  And after The Road Warrior, he never had to look back. 

The first Mad Max film never really went into detail about the background for the society that surrounds Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), although this brief synopsis should help:  Max is a policeman in a world where chaos has pretty much taken over and gangs rule the road.  A gang that Max tangles with ends up killing his family and Max ditches his policeman status and goes on a revenge rampage. 

By the time of The Road Warrior some time has passed.  (I estimate maybe a year or so).  At the beginning of the movie the narrator tells a little more of the background of how the world that Max currently lives in came to be.  It was a world war initiated by two great powers (and although they never state which powers, it doesn't take a PhD to infer the culprits).  Now the road is ruled by various gangs who are out in search of the elusive commodity, gasoline, to power their cars and motorcycles.

The Road Warrior (1981): (aka Mad Max 2)

Max (Mel Gibson) is a loner who roams the Outback with his dog. 

He is assaulted by a gang, intent on taking his vehicle and whatever gasoline he has.  But max has other ideas.  Wez (Vernon Wells) and his gang come away empty as Max outmaneuvers and out guns them.

Farther down the road Max stumbles upon an apparently abandoned gyrocopter.  Intent on raiding the vehicle for gas for his own car he is captured by the Gyro Captain (Bruce Spence).  But Max quickly turns the tables on the Gyro Captain and takes him prisoner.  In an effort to save his own skin, the Captain tells max of an enclave just up the road where he can get "all the gas you want."

Upon arriving at the enclave, Max and the Captain discover the enclave surrounded by a gang intent on taking the gasoline for their own purposes.  As Max and the Captain watch from afar, two separate vehicles leave the compound, but are immediately surrounded by the gang.  The gang is being run by a character called the Humungus (Kjell Nillson), whose right hand man is our old friend Wez from the earlier assault on Max.

After the gang leaves the victims, Max approaches one of the vehicles and finds one man still alive.  Assured by the man that if Max takes him back to the compound he can have as much gas as he can carry.  Unfortunately the man dies upon arrival, and the leader of the compound, Pappagallo (Mike Preston, who looks, to me, quite a bit like a rather well-worn  Peter O'Toole...) tells Max that his "deal" died with the dead man.  Not only that, but he takes Max prisoner.

As the gang continues their assault outside the compound, Humungus addresses the besieged people, claiming that if they surrender the entire supply of gas within the compound he will allow them to leave.  Of course, no one believes him.  Max then tells Pappagallo of an abandoned rig he saw just down the road that he promises he can bring to them in exchange for the gas that he originally wanted.

With the help of the Captain, who apparently must be desperate for companionship after the way Max has been treating him, they end up getting the rig to the compound.  Although Pappagallo pleads with Max to drive the rig and gas out into the Outback, max claims that his part of the bargain is over and leaves.  But he is attacked by the gang and his car is wrecked.  And a couple of would-be gang thieves are killed as the car explodes taking the precious gas within with them.  Max, severely wounded but still alive, manages to crawl back to the compound where he finally agrees to drive the rig to safety.

I just realized I completely forgot about one of the secondary characters in the flick, a boy only referred to in the credits as The Feral Kid (Emil Minty).  A wild child in the extreme,  and a deadly shot with a boomerang, the Kid bonds with Max and tries to tag along with him.  And it is revealed at the end of the movie that the Kid, now grown, is our humble narrator.  (As a side note: Minty only appeared in three movies, all as a kid.  According to wikipedia he went to school and studied to be a jeweler and now resides in Sydney in the capacity of a jeweler.)

Australian films of this type rival Hong Kong action flicks for sheer chaos and destruction.  An excellent documentary I saw a few months ago, Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild Untold Story of Ozploitation! (which, by the way was the inspiration for creating this blogathon) tells the riveting story of how Oz became the rival for sheer action on film.  Some of the films in the documentary I am actively seeking for future entries on The Midnite Drive-In.

Well folks time to power up the Plymouth and head home.  Hope I manage to avoid the road gangs.  Drive safely folks.

Quiggy

Shadows of the Future

This is my second entry in the End of the World Blogathon hosted by yours truly and Movie Movie Blog Blog.

Terry Gilliam is one of my favorite directors.  He has an odd sense of the world and his movies tend to be outre.  His works include Time Bandits, Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and The Zero Theorem, all of which stretch the boundaries of reality.  I love a film that, initially, makes you leave the theater wondering just what the hell happened.  And Gilliam's movies tend to do that to me.  Which makes them get on my list of favorite movies, as bizarre as that sounds.

I also love the concept of time travel.  Sometimes the mechanisms for initiating time travel are central to the story (as in The Time Machine) and at other times you are just expected to take it for granted that time travel is possible, but aren't given any details about the operation of whatever machinery accomplishes the process (as in The Terminator)

12 Monkeys falls into the second category, but there is an added twist to it.  We as the viewers are hip to the idea that Bruce Willis' character is from the future, because we see the future world and see him given his mission.  But is that really the case?  For one thing, as would be expected, James Cole (his character), as would be expected, is thought to be insane by the modern world, because who in his right mind would claim to be from the future?  And the audience is left in suspense throughout the movie as the idea that maybe he really is insane and it's all in his mind is hinted at during the course of the film.

12 Monkeys (1995):

The future is bleak.  The world lives underground, since at some point in the past a manufactured virus wiped out most of the population.  Criminals are given the task of going above ground to collect samples to see how the virus is progressing in hopes of it's dissipation, so that life could be resumed above ground.  James Cole (Bruce Willis) is one of these criminals.  After a mission to topside Cole is brought before a group of scientists and given a new mission.

His goal is to go back to 1996 and discover the origins of the virus.  The future scientists believe that the originators of the virus were "The Army of the Twelve Monkeys", mainly because the world topside is covered with graffiti that has an emblem, representing the 12 Monkeys and the word "We did it!"

But the scientists aim is off.  Cole ends up in 1990, 6 years before the virus outbreak.  He is arrested and sent to an insane asylum, because after all, he must be crazy.  He thinks he's from the future!  Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeline Stowe) and her superiors put him in an insane asylum.

The asylum is  where he meets Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt).  Jeffrey is the son of a rich industrialist, but he's not all there.  (Pitt was nominated for an Oscar for this role, but lost to Spacey for his role in The Usual Suspects, a slight for which I have never forgiven the Academy.   You have to see the portrayal to get my position.)

The scientists in the future are keeping an eye on Cole, and zap him out of there toot sweet.  But like most people in charge, they blame Cole for screwing up the mission, even though they were the ones at fault for sending him to the wrong time.  He is asked if he wants to try again, and Cole agrees.  But they send him to a battle in the middle of World War I in France.  Screwed up again....Bureaucrats!

Finally they get it right and send him to 1996.  He kidnaps Railly and forces her to help him.  Initially she does so just to keep her life safe, but gradually she comes to realize that Cole must have something on the ball, and even more gradually comes to realize that Cole must be telling the truth about his coming from the future.

Complicating matters is the fact that Cole is falling in love with Railly and begins to try to convince himself that all this future crap is really just in his mind.  The Gilliam touch of trying to decide just what is reality comes to play in spades.  I liken Gilliam movies to what one of my favorite sci-fi authors, Philip K. Dick (author of such works that inspired Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report).  The question remains throughout whether this is all just in Cole's head, or if he really is from a plague devastated future.  Further complicating his mission is the fact that in the 1996 version of the past (which is actually the present for the movie goer), Jeffrey is now out of the mental hospital and working with his father and the scientists.  But he is still bat-shit crazy. 

He is involved with an animal activist paramilitary group called the Army of the 12 Monkeys, who have a plan to create havoc on the world.  Spoiler Alert! however, it's not to release the plague that devastates the future.


12 Monkeys was inspired by a short French film, called La Jetee and if you find this movie interesting, checking out that movie ought to be next on your list.  The similarities are there in black and white, and it serves  as a pretty good accompanying piece to the film.

!2 Monkeys has really lost none of it's impact in the past 20 years, although it is somewhat hampered by the fact that Gilliam chose to use a "quote" from a scientific journal at the preface of the movie stating that a man who claimed to be from the future predicted that the world would be devastated by a plague in 1996.  In 1995 it may have been a bit Twilight Zone-ish, but now it just hangs there as part of a film, not as an ooo-weee-ooo type thing.  Of course, Y2K and 2012 turned out to be duds, too, but the initial effect was a bit more dramatic at the time.

So ends this excursion into the weird world of Armageddon.  Drive home safely, folks.  And if you should pick up a hitchhiker on the way home claiming to be from 2112, give his story at least some thought.

Quiggy

It's The Beginning Of The End (of the World Blogathon)

Today starts the End of the World Blogathon which is being hosted by yours truly and my partner in crime, Movie Movie Blog Blog.  We have gathered some of the most interesting movies concerning the End of the world and brought them all together, with the help of some fellow prognosticators and their movie choices.  Hope you enjoy the foray.  This post will be updated periodically over the course of the weekend, so if it's not April 3rd in your part of the world, there is probably still more to come.  Keep coming back.

The End of the World Movie List:



My first entry is on On the Beach, a look at the end after a nuclear war has devastated most of the world.

Movie Movie Blog Blog takes a humorous look at the situation with an entry on both Plan 9 From Outer Space and Strange Brew

Maddy Loves Her Classic Films looks at the impact of Deep Impact

1984, the 1956 version, plays out in melodramatic fashion for Silver Screenings.

An obscure but fascinating movie, The Story of Mankind, intrigues Seeker of Truth.

What happens When Worlds Collide?  Ask Caftan Woman.

The end of the sun would mean the end of the world.  Thoughts All Sorts discusses Sunshine

Speakeasy considers two classic looks at the end, This is Not A Test and Five

The Dream Book Blog gives us the film noir side of the end with Kiss Me Deadly

Movierob  tells us about his thoughts on I Am Legend

A classic from the dawn of the last century, End of the World comes from Diary of a Movie Maniac.

Panic in the Year Zero! is the subject of an entry by Old Hollywood Films

The end of the world comes with a whimper.  Once Upon a Screen  talks about Fail Safe

Your truly looks at a Terry Gilliam classic, 12 Monkeys

Things to Come is discussed by Crítica Retrô:

Realweegiemidget Reviews gives thoughts on Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Movierob sides with many of the people who saw the film version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Moon in Gemini looks at a classic 80's outing War Games

Quiggy