Frightday Night Film Recommendations: It’s The End Of The World As We Know It…And I Feel F*cked.

It’s Friday…

Ahem…I mean Frightday…

And I have some recommendations for you to enjoy this weekend…

Okay…This Frightday’s theme is…

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It…And I Feel F*cked.

The year was 1979…

Moviegoers were introduced to a character named…

Mad Max…

They were also introduced to a violent world on the brink of societal meltdown…

A dystopian nightmare of a world that devolves over three sequels…

And after watching Mad Max…

I learned a valuable lesson…

Upon the destruction of our civilization…

The thing to really be afraid of out there…

Is other people.

So, let’s take a chronological look at the best, bleakest, and possibly even unknown to you, It’s The End Of The World As We Know It…And I Feel F*cked Movies in the years following Mad Max. 

Night of the Comet (1984) – After watching Stranger Things on Netflix…I realized that we really did do things a whole lot differently in the 80’s…Point of fact…If it were 1984, and a comet passed through our atmosphere…Instantly disintegrating the majority of the people…Turning a good portion of the rest into violent and deranged zombies…And leaving only a handful of unscathed survivors behind…What would we the survivors do? That’s right…We’d like totally go to the mall…The resilience of the kids and teenagers in the 80’s is something that still amazes me…I guess that’s what happens when you train an entire generation to get under their desk at school, and wait patiently for the approaching nuclear explosion to blow their collective asses sky high…Interesting side note about this flick…The character of Sam, played by scream queen Kelli Maroney…Was one of the inspirations for Joss Whedon’s undead ass-kicking cheerleader, Buffy Summers.

Delicatessen (1991) – Before directing The City of Lost Children, and Alien: Resurrection…Jean-Pierre Jeunet gave us his feature film debut…A Gilliamesque story about the residents of an apartment building in post-apocalyptic France…The leader of these residents is a heavyset, knife-wielding butcher named Clapet, who gives the Sweeney Todd treatment to his fellow-man, and serves them up at his first floor butcher shop…His daughter falls for Louison, a man who thinks he’s been hired for a job at the butcher shop, but is really destined to be a porterhouse…The relationship that formed between them, has a sort of surrealistic, almost Pushing Daisies feel…You know, weird, yet heartwarming…Between all of the interconnected relationships in the building…The cannibalism…The Troglodistes, a band of rogue vegetarians that live in the sewers…This film is a psychedelic roller coaster ride at a theme park called The End Of The World.

Children of Men (2006) – Seven years before creating the award-winning film,  Gravity…Alfonso Cuarón wrote and directed this gritty, dark, and frighteningly realistic view of a world where human procreation has become a thing of the past…Taking place in London, eighteen years after the last natural birth…Clive Owen plays Theo, a man willing to risk his own life to protect a young refugee who just might be the first pregnant woman in two decades…This is one of my favorite end of the world movies…It carries this eerie ever-presence of doom that seems to be lurking a few years or maybe even months in our own future…For me, the equation is simple…With the increased probability of the filmmaker’s chosen destruction…Comes the increased stress and anxiety that the audience feels while they watch…This film twists and turns and almost every single one of the characters reek to high-heaven with the stench of mistrust…At times, Theo seems like the last good man on Planet Earth…And after all that he goes through to save this girl and her baby…He just might be.

 Doomsday (2008) – Neil Marshall, the man behind two of my all-time favorites…The amazing horror films…Dog Soldiers, and The Descent…Followed them up with an homage to the great apocalypse films of the past…As you watch this film…You might catch a whiff of Escape From New York…You might even step in a pile of The Road Warrior…These influences only helped this intense post-apocalyptic nightmare…The bulk of the story takes place thirty years after a deadly plague destroys Scotland…The Reaper Virus, which was assumed contained, has now been discovered in London…The political leaders decide to send a team into a quarantined Scotland, in an attempt to discover a cure for the virus…Upon their arrival, they discover a feudal lord, played by Malcolm McDowell, who rules his post-apocalyptic, punk-rocking, neo-medieval kingdom from behind the high walls of his castle…Rhona Mitra (The Last Ship), is the leader of the infiltration team, and is instantly identifiable as the film’s resident badass…And let me tell you, she calls upon her inner Plissken in this flick, and transformed herself into one of the best ass-kicking movie heroines ever…This was some seriously amazing stuff.

Pandorum (2009) – This dark and mysterious thriller takes place in a future where life on Earth is a thing of the past…What’s left of the human race has been shot into space in an ark called Elysium…German director, Christian Alvart (Antibodies, Case 39) created a darker and more horrifying look at space travel in his first foray into science fiction…The atmosphere that he created is a gloomy, grungy, grimy one…The interiors of the ship are reminiscent of the besmirched, befouled, begrimed Fury 161 set from David Fincher’s Alien3…The main cast is amazing in this one…You’ve got the incredible Dennis Quaid (I love Quaid…Sorry, can’t help it) …The creepy yet brilliant Ben Foster…And of course…The Man, The Myth, The Last Surviving Dixon Brother, Norman Reedus…The story is dealt to the audience like a blackjack dealer on Quaaludes…Slowly and at times, even a bit confusing…But not in a bad way…Because as the mystery unravels, and the picture of what in the wide, wide world of sports is going on gets clearer…The audience is left with a mind-bending tale of deception, delusion, and destruction.

The Vanishing on 7th Street (2010) –Brad Anderson…The man behind Session 9, The Machinist, and Transsiberian…Directed this uniquely original and totally terrifying view of what the end of the world might look like…What is it that takes the world out this time? What is it that the few remaining survivors are fleeing?…The Dark…Yep…That’s right…The Dark. I’m assuming that it’s been years since any of us were afraid of the dark…But The Dark that stalks its human prey in this film is unlike anything that I’ve ever seen…Hayden Christensen turned in a redemptive performance in this one…For the first time following his performance of Anakin in the dreadful Star Wars prequels…I forgot about them…It’s true…And you know what? I even forgive him…Hey…Why not?…At least he didn’t play Jar Jar Binks…Sorry, Ahmed Best…It really wasn’t your fault…I blame George Lucas.

The Book of Eli (2010) – After a nine year hiatus following their film, From Hell…The Hughes Brothers came back with this tale of a man on a mission in a nuclear wasteland…Kind of like The Blues Brothers…Eli, played by Denzel Washington also appears to be on a mission from God…He traverses this desiccated landscape with a very important book…And a sword which he wields like Michonne on crystal meth…There is a bad man who wants to take this book away from Eli…He’s a real son of a bitch…A douche-nozzle, if you will…Playing out of type, Gary Oldman decided to shake things up, and play an asshole for once…This film cruises along at a brisk pace, especially for a post-apocalyptic film…And doesn’t end in your typical Hollywood fashion…Which is a dose of refreshing realism…Regardless of the mixed reviews this film received…I found it compelling…With a purpose-filled plot…And outstanding performances.

Dredd (2012) – In this film…Audiences see for the first time, a gritty, filthy, utterly authentic version of the legendary 2000 AD comic character…Thanks to Alex Garland, who wrote a taut and brutally violent script…And Karl Urban (Star Trek’s New Bones) who made me forget all about the horrid first incarnation of the character…In this future version of the U.S., now referred to as the Cursed Earth…There lives a city that spans the east coast called, Mega-City One…And in that city where crime runs amok…There is one law…The judges…These guys are cops, judges, juries and executioners all rolled into one…When Judge Dredd takes new recruit, and powerful psychic Anderson, played by Olivia Thirlby (Juno) to Peach Trees, a 200 story high-rise controlled by drug queenpin, Ma-Ma, played by Lena Headey…In this flick, Headey’s character makes Cercei Lannister seem like a fwuffy, widdle kitten…She traps Dredd and Anderson within the walls of her domain…The two then have to battle their way out confronted at every turn by either thugs on drugs, or dirty judges.

 

Snowpiercer (2013) – One of my favorite monster movies of late is the Korean film, The Host directed by Bong Joon-ho…In this one…The director brings to life a French graphic novel, Le Transperceneige…And a world where an ice-age has rendered the planet uninhabitable…The only survivors are on a perpetually moving train that circles the wasteland…The train cars are separated like a transportation caste system, with the special people, you know…The rich and more important ones residing in the front of the train…The poor and so much less important survivors barely eke out an existence at the back of the train…That is, until Captain America himself, Chris Evans leads a gang of scruffy miscreants in a revolt and storms car by car towards the front of the train…The biting social commentary regarding the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor is in full effect here…And it’s about time for the Have Nots to teach those greedy Haves a lesson.

 

The Rover (2014) – From director David Michôd, who burst onto the scene in 2010 with his intense feature film debut, Animal Kingdom…In this film, he created a desolate wasteland that used to be Australia following an economic collapse…After a robbery goes south…A band of thieves has fled the scene, leaving behind one of their ranks…They are in sudden need of a new vehicle, so they take the closest one they find…The car owner is played by Guy Pearce (Ravenous) and he will stop at nothing to recover his stolen property…To assist him is the brother of one of the thieves…Robert Pattinson (Cosmopolis) plays the one who was left behind, and the only one who might know the destination of the stolen car…Pattinson’s performance of a white-trash American simpleton was such a non-sparkly, transformative one…That it almost erased his Twilight legacy…With these two talented actors giving stellar performances…With an intelligent and touching story…And with the raw, unbridled brutality that marries so perfectly with a lawless wasteland such as this…This is a true post-apocalyptic gem.

 Z for Zachariah (2015) – The most character driven film on the list…This film, that reminds me so much (in a good way) of the 1985 Aussie sci-fi cult classic, The Quiet Earth…Manages to capture the loneliness of the end of the world…And just what it does to the heart, soul and mind of a human being…This limited, but amazing cast consists of…Margot Robbie (Suicide Squad) who plays Ann…A survivor of a nuclear holocaust…Her home is located in the least radiated valley, a safe haven that somehow remains protected from the fallout…She then meets her counterpart…The Last Man on Earth…Or John, if you’re into the whole brevity thing…He’s played by Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years A Slave)…And for a while, he integrates himself into Ann’s world in a fairly cohesive fashion…Until…The Other, Kind Of Hunky, Super-Charming, Wicked Cute, Last Man On Earth shows up…Shouldn’t be a problem…Right? Once the love triangle gets established…The story twists and turns in ways I never expected.