A Boy and His Dog - Post-Nuclear. This movie, sometimes referred to as “A Dog and his Boy” centers on Vic (Don Johnson) and his telepathic dog named Blood. Vic travels the wastelands with Blood foraging for food and…raping women?…some protagonist. They eventually encounter an underground city where men are scarce so a new influx of semen is needed. Vic leaves Blood and goes underground. He eventually finds love and finds out something nefarious is going on and leaves with his new honey. Upon getting to the surface he finds Blood near death and in one of the strangest endings ever, Vic kills, cooks and feeds his new love interest to Blood and they live happily ever after…raping women, I’m sure.

The Postman - Post-Nuclear. Kevin Costner stars as a wanderer that finds an old US Post Office uniform and inadvertently starts up a post-nuclear postal service. This film is most remembered as Costner’s next worse movie after Waterworld, but I like it. The storyline is pretty solid and has some excellent set locations. The main antagonist, General Bethlehem is well written and interesting. I just don’t see why this movie generates so much hate, other than it being fashionably cool to diss all Costner movies except Dances With Wolves. I like it, fuck the haters.

The Day After - Post-Nuclear. This movie and Threads kind of go hand in hand. Both were produced in the early 80’s for television and both showed the after effects of nuclear war on everyday people. The Day After deals with residents in and around Lawrence, Kansas after a nuclear exchange with Russia nukes Kansas City and several other US cities. It has a big, sprawling cast that includes such 80’s stalwarts as Jason Robards, Steve Guttenberg and JoBeth Williams. Originally conceived as a 4 hour miniseries it was shortened to a 2 hour movie because execs were worried all that doom and gloom over 2 nights would make people sad. Idiots. It includes cool scenes of people being vaporized by a nuclear blast and one guy getting blinded by staring at the explosion. haha.

Threads - Post-Nuclear. This BBC drama is hauntingly realistic in it’s portrayal of life after the bomb drops. The city of Sheffield England is the setting and it focuses on a young pregnant girl named Ruth and how she and others cope with things like rape gangs, looters and radiation poison. One cool thing about this movie is some characters are introduced and killed of rather graphically or, in the instance of Ruth’s boyfriend, Jimmy, run off to find someone and we never see them again. Leading to the assumption that they died at some point either through malice or succumbed to the radiation. The end of the movie fast forwards 13 years to find Ruth and her daughter fruitlessly trying to grow crops. Ruth dies, her daughter is raped and gives birth to a deformed, stillborn baby. the end. It’s fucking depressing but very well done.

Children of Men - Post-Nuclear/Biological. Clive Owen plays a former rabble rouser who gets drafted back into the cause to escort a woman carrying the first baby in 19 years to an enclave of scientists. This movie has it all, great story, great acting, great directing, superb camera work…everything.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome - Post-Nuclear. A pre-racist Mel Gibson and post-Ike Tina Turner? Oh yeah. A sequel to both Mad Max and Road Warrior, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (or MMBT, as fans call it) follows former Australian policeman Max as he journeys through a nuclear devastated Outback. After stumbling into Bartertown, a make shift town that runs on methane from pig shit, While fighting in the Thunderdome, Max breaks a deal with Auntie Entity (Turner), leading to the introduction of one of the movies signature lines..”Bust a deal, face the wheel” . Max is exiled and hooks up with a tribe of feral children looking for their savior, Captain Walker. They go back to Bartertown, bust up the operation but at no point do they go “beyond Thunderdome” so I have no idea what the title means, but it’s a good romp.

The Omega Man - Post-Biological. Charlton Heston plays a military scientist named Neville who creates a vaccine to immunize himself from a plague as it starts spreading. The bulk of the movie has Neville fighting a group of nocturnal, cloaked plague sufferers called “The Family”. In the original book they were actually vampires but in the movie their more like light-sensitive luddites that want to kill Neville because he “Lives by the wheel”, an oblique reference to the fact that Neville lives in a fortified, generator powered apartment with plenty of ammo that he uses to kill Family members. In the end Neville meets a group of young, survivors that the plague is taking longer to kill, he develops a serum from his vaccinated blood to save them. In the closing act he dies in a Christ-like way after ensuring his serum would help save who’s left. I remember watching this when I was younger and being freaked out by the scarred, deformed “Family”. Heston’s trademarked overacting doesn’t lead to any “YOU FINALLY DID IT! YOU BASTARDS!!” moments, but it’s memorable nonetheless.

28 Days Later - Post-Biological. Fucking Brits. In between tea and crumpets they’ve gone and invented a deadly virus that turns normal people into crazed loonies intent on killing everyone in sight. Awesome. People sometimes mislabel this movie as a zombie flick, it ain’t. The infected are not dead, they’re just batshit insane. It kind of meanders toward the middle once the main stars find the military base but it ends well with lots of action and finally hope for rescue.

The Stand - Post-Biological. The Stephen King movie based on the book all his other work is compared to. I love this movie. The Stand deals with the aftermath of a nasty strain of flu escaping from a military compound and basically killing most of the country. The survivors are essentially in one of two camps. Those that follow the wisdom of Mother Abigail or those that swear fealty to demonic Randall Flagg. The titular Stand is the battle of good versus evil. Good movie, even better book. I was kind of disappointed they didn’t include some of the cooler things from the novel like the TV station take over during the outbreak or the steps taken to make the Colorado Free Zone, but still it’s an excellent movie and worth the 6 hours to watch.