Format: Internet video on the new internet machine.
I’m a fan of apocalyptic films of most varieties. As someone who came of age in the ‘80s, the apocalypse variety that was most prevalent in my own imagination was not the zombie variety, but the nuclear one. The Day After was a formative film for a lot of us, and Threads is perhaps the most disturbing nuclear holocaust film ever made. There’s something about a good apocalypse movie that makes me feel like I’m coming home. These films got gorier and more graphic as the years rolled on, so finding a movie from the ‘60s like Panic in Year Zero! was a lot of fun.
Since this is a nuclear apocalypse film, you know where this is going right away. The Baldwin family, Harry (Ray Milland, who also directed this movie) and his wife Ann (Jean Hagen) along with kids Rick (Frankie Avalon), and Karen (Mary Mitchel) are leaving home for a camping vacation. As they leave, they see a huge flash behind them, and soon find out that Los Angeles has been hit with some sort of atomic weapon. Over the next few hours, Harry comes to the realization that the world is going to become much less civilized over the coming days. He heads off the highway to find a grocery store in the middle of nowhere before anyone else has been there. At a nearby hardware store, Harry runs out of money and essentially holds up the owner of the store for the guns he wants to buy, promising to pay him when he can. At a gas station, the attendant tries to gouge Harry by multiplying the price of the gas by 10, and Harry, realizing that civilization is breaking down faster than he thought it would, assaults the man, leaves him the cash for the real price, and the family heads off once again.
