As we mentioned before, there have been a ton of young-adult postapocalyptic novels, many of them quite disturbing and hardcore. (And our list didn't even mention Uglies or Tripods.) And, Glenn adds:

I can think of a dozen post-apocalyptic movies that I saw as a teen, in the '80s, at the Harvard Square and Orson Welles theaters — including "Planet of the Apes" (1968) and sequels, "The Omega Man" (1971), "Sleeper" (1973), "Death Race 2000" (1975), "A Boy and His Dog" (1975), and of course "Road Warrior" (1981). As hard as it is to believe that adults would go to see "Death Race 2000," though, these movies weren't intended for teen audiences. So they don't count.

There have also been a couple of post-apocalyptic TV shows that seemed aimed at teens: the original "Battlestar Galactica," for example, not to mention "Planet of the Apes." I've never seen "Jericho," so I can't say whether it's aimed at teens. Oh yeah, in England, in the 1980s, there was a short-lived TV adaptation of John Christopher's excellent "Tripod" trilogy.

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Will City of Ember be the first Post Apocalyptic Children's film? [Quiet Earth]
Post-Apocalyptic Kiddie Movies [Boston Globe]

Here's the official synopsis:

Veteran-turned-mercenary Thoorop takes the high-risk job of escorting a woman from Russia to China. Little does he know that she is host to an organism that a cult wants to harvest in order to produce a genetically modified Messiah.

[SciFiCool]

Diaz's character appears to be traveling, with a bunch of other Travelers, down a highway at night, but it's not clear where they're going or why. It's a pretty horrendous existence, that much is clear, and every now the transport stops at a depot and everyone "reforges". Here's the most jarring and futuristic passage:

Since the transport is automated it switches its lights on only when it detects another vehicle or when we're in civilization but at night on the interstates it feels like we're rushing through a corridor of whooshing air as unlit as a vein. We pass cities and zonafrancas and fortress towns and overhead roar fighter jets and gunships and every now and then the transport will squash something on the road. A rumble under the tires and then the return to the lullaby of the whoosh as whatever it is gets spat out behind the mud flaps in ruin.

I really like the notion that Wall-E's crush on Eve, the far more advanced robot, forces her to evolve and become more self-aware. That could actually be cool to watch. And then Wall-E's quest somehow "reboots" the human race? It definitely seems like a more ambitious storyline than the Toy Story movies. [Slashfilm]

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It used to be that if you wanted to get a crazy hairstyle and big shoulder pads and reenact the climactic chase/fight from Road Warrior, you'd have to go to Australia or Japan. But in 2004, a group called Roadwar USA came together to bring the post-apocalyptic road rage to America. The group has done three events so far, starting in the SF Bay area, and another event is planned for the Las Vegas area in June, in conjunction with the Dark Skies/Singularity artists' convention.

The basic format of the Road Warrior reenactments is pretty simple: the Roadwar U.S.A. crew rents a semi truck (an R-series Mack truck with something resembling a fuel tanker), to stand in for the tanker that Max drives at the end of the movie. Then as many Mad Max replica cars, trucks and dune buggies as possible chase the truck down the highway and surround it. The star of the show is usually the black "pursuit special," aka the interceptor or the Black-on-Black (BoB for short.) In the movie, the BoB is a 1973 Ford Falcon GT, a model only sold in Australia. The reenactors have managed to get the exacct same model, only from 1974 instead of 1973. And of course, the BoB has a supercharger ("blower") mounted on its hood.

The participants in the highway chase scene have only gotten arrested once, in San Antonio. Says organizer Karol Bartoszynski:

Basically the media assumed we had "fake machine guns" and looked like we were "attacking" the tanker truck. All we had was [what you can see] in the pics: Roadwarrior-type thing in the truck, a fake crossbow, a pick-axe. People thought the 4-barrel fake gun was a rocket launcher... and we were some kind of militia or terrorists. Most of us spent overnight in jail.

Vehicles usually also include a red pick-up truck, with a snake painted on its side and a gun-wielding maniac riding shotgun. People dress as Wez, with the trademark red mohawk, and as random Bartertown guards. Sometimes there's even a gyrocopter flying above the whole mess.

And the real Wez (Vernon Wells) has turned up for the two most recent Roadwars. The shows also usually include a meeting at a racetrack, a car show, a cruise down the major strip of the local town, and parties.

Karol says he really wanted to have a get-together for Mad Max fans in the U.S., and didn't just want to have people sitting around a conference room eating hotel food and dissecting the deeper meaning of the films:

I just wanted to feel the spirit of the movie and bring people together to help bring that feeling of being IN the movie to life. I'm not against panels, or anything, I just thought it would be cool to have a "chase" be the main piece of the event. That's what Mad Max is all about.

The dark secret of Quintet is that it's sort of a crappy game. Here Newman is, having lost his entire family to the postapocalyptic Rottweilers and stab-happy Quintet players, and he's finally killed his last opponent in the game. And it only now occurs to him to find out what the prize is. Which is, basically, bragging rights. You get to hang around the crappy parlor with the guy in the zany felt hat and talk about all the people you scragged. I would at least want a sticker, or maybe a slice of blueberry pie. With whipped cream.

At least the pre-torn skirts and tops will save the cyborgs a lot of time, when they catch up with you. And it's good that one skirt says "CANNIBAL" on it, lest your captors forget what they are.

Meanwhile, self-proclaimed postapocalyptic designer Yeohlee Teng unveiled her fall 2008 collection last month, and it actually does look like stuff that might offer some protection from falling satellites and spattering monster blood. Could this be a rare instance where mainstream fashion is actually smarter than subculture wear? Look at this gallery and decide for yourself: Yeohlee photos by Scott Gries/Getty Images for IMG.

The Descent and Doomsday both focus on women venturing into perilous situations. Do you think it's important that the heroes in your films are women? Do you write women characters differently, or are they just heroes who happen to be women?

It's certainly not some kind of career plan to have my heroes be women, it's just turned out that way. I actually wrote the story for Doomsday several years before I made The Descent. It was one of 3 scripts I tried to get made in the wake of The Descent and it was the one that Rogue Pictures chose to back, so it's really just a coincidence that my new hero is also a woman and I saw no reason to change the character into a man just because of what I'd done previously.

I try to write women as authentically as possible. Above all things, no matter how tough and rugged I make the characters, they should never lose their femininity.

The thing that seems most intriguing to me about Doomsday is that it seems to straddle genre lines, including horror, scifi, medical thriller, etc. Do you think this is true? Are you consciously trying to blend genres?

I love to blend genres. Taking the best elements from different inspirations and throwing them all into the mix is what makes it fun. Besides, I think the lines between genres have often been blurred at best, and that's no bad thing.

Most post-apocalyptic movies nowadays feature monsters (28 days, I Am Legend, etc. ) Are you consciously trying to reclaim post-apocalyptic movies from the monster-movie genre?

Absolutely! It's like there's an unspoken rule in movies now that virus = zombies! Well that's not what post-apocalyptic movies are about for me. It should be about human survival, because the day the next big global pandemic arrives, there won't be any zombies running around, I can promise you that. This is real, terrifying stuff, just as real as nuclear war was when the last great post apocalyptic movies (like The Road Warrior) came out. And that's the kind of gritty, savage world I'm trying to revisit with this movie.

[ShockTillYOuDrop]

Right before this clip, the town has managed to fight off a wave of bikers with crazy hair and makeup. But they rejoice too soon — the bikers call in their corporate security guard brothers, who shred the town's defenses so the bikers can build a giant ramp and jump in.

I really can't possibly do 2020 Texas Gladiators as much justice as the master, Joe-Bob Briggs, in his write-up. (In a nutshell, it starts with zombies attacking nuns in a Texas monastery, only to be rescued by rednecks, then it leads to bikers attacking the plucky little town, with the help of the guys in jumpsuits. Fight fight fight fight fight. The end.) But here are a couple of observations:

• The brief scene, between the zombie-monastery attack and the biker/riot cop attack, where the bearded guy keeps the town's refinery from blowing up and then gives a little speech, totally reminded me of Jericho. For about 30 seconds, you think this might actually turn into a post-apocalyptic survival movie, instead of just a big spaghetti Mad Max kung-fu battle in Texas.
• 
  
• How awesome is it that the riot shields are basically just a flimsy frame with a giant hole in them? And then there's a "force field" effect added in post. The movie ends with the bald guy walking down the street, alone, with one of those riot shields. Everybody's shooting at him, to no effect. And then one guy tosses a hatchet from a rooftop. And somehow, that gets through. Why? We'll never know.

In Doomsday, the lethal Reaper virus nearly wipes out a small country (I think it's England, but the synopses don't make that clear), so the rest of the world walls off that country to keep the virus in. (As far as I can tell, the virus doesn't make you savage or mean, it just kills you, unless you're lucky.) Three decades pass, and the rest of the world remains virus-free. Until one day, the virus turns up in a major city. The authorities send Rhona Mitra into the quarantined country to try and retrieve a cure to the virus by any means necessary. But you just know that if two women enter this country, only one woman will leave. It's that sort of country. Doomsday, directed by Marshall (The Descent, Dog Soldiers) opens March 14 from Universal Pictures.

The vault will hold up to 4.5 million batches of seeds for the world's main food crops, allowing humanity to re-establish agriculture if our main food plants disappear due to a catastrophe. Already, "gene vaults" from Iraq and Afghanistan were destroyed due to the wars in those countries. Images by AP.

[AFP]

Jericho seems to have gone from being a pretty conservative narrative to a much more radical one. The first season revolved around a vision of the American heartland pulling together after the cities vanished — plus a "clash of the patriarchs" among mayor Johnston Green, his rival Gray Anderson, and Phil Constantino, the sheriff of neighboring town New Bern. And now, in the second season, the rival patriarchs have vanished and the show is much more about the younger characters and their distrust of all authority. And the over-arching plot arc seems to revolve around an arch-conservative government that's lying about the reasons for the nuclear explosions, to cover its own involvement.

So I asked Barbee whether there had been a conscious shift in the show's politics between the first and second seasons.

Barbee responded that "We don't talk politics in the writers' room. We talk characters." The main reason there's less focus on rival patriarchs this season is because Johnston Green, the main characters' father, died in the first season finale. "Johnston Green was always meant to die," Barbee said, calling the show a remake of The Lion King. "Johnston Green had to die so that Jake could step up," and his generation could be faced with having to live up to Johnston's legacy. But there was no intention to change the show's politics, she insisted.

Still, it's no coincidence that the show is alluding to the Iraq war during an election war. "We read the papers," said Barbee. "We are influenced by what goes on."

Because the season is only seven episodes instead of the 22 Barbee and her fellow producers had planned, things move at a much more breakneck pace and "there's no time for treading water." She gave a bit more detail about what a 22-episode second season would have looked like, with storylines taking place in Cheyenne, WY (the capital of the new government, which controls the Western U.S.) and New York City. One character would have left New York to travel across the country to Jericho, and we would have seen more of the country through that character's eyes. The three storylines would have come together at the season's end in Cheyenne. But now there won't be any New York stuff.

Barbee also repeated what she'd said before, that the first season was about saving the town, the second season was about saving the country, and the third season (if any) would be about saving the world.

Oh, and Lennie James, who plays badass CIA agent Robert Hawkins, said his character could kick Jack Bauer's ass

Production Charts just posted this description of how the movie will translate the book's plot:

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

Bradbury himself has been involved in every step of the movie, which takes place in an Earth left barren after a third world war. Scientists in a research facility are struggling to find ways to revive plant life. One of the scientists apparently dies, but then a plant chrysalis grows around him and saves him. He starts changing into something new and scary. Here's a passage from the original story:

He could not see. But yes, yes, he could, and it was like the inside of a small dark red cavern, as if his eyes were turned inward upon his skull. And Smith tried to twist his tongue, and suddenly, trying to scream, he knew his tongue was gone, that the place where it used to be was vacant, an itching spot that wanted a tongue but couldn't have it just now.

His tongue was an itching spot.

Photo by Getty Images.

This novel is about the arduous journey a father undertakes as he tries to get his son to safety after nuclear fallout and war has ravaged the world and turned most of the survivors into flesh-eating cannibals. The father and his son push a grocery cart through the wasteland, scavenging for food and supplies as they try to survive. The father's wife, long dead and seen only in brief flashbacks, will be played by Theron who is apparently a huge fan of the novel.

She'll be joined by either Guy Pearce or Viggo Mortensen as the father. However, having devotedly read all of McCarthy's novels, I'm not sure how what's on the page will translate to the screen very well, especially with these celebricons. Of course, I could be wrong. Even McCarthy's allegedly unfilmable Blood Meridian is getting a movie version, courtesy of Ridley Scott, so maybe filmmakers have cracked the code. After all, I never thought I'd enjoy No Country For Old Men on the big screen, but I was wrong about that one too.

Charlize Theron Hits The Road [Variety]

Doomsday, coming in May, is post-apocalyptic but not a zombie movie. People assume Doomsday features zombies because it's about a plague that wipes out most of the population, complains director Neil Marshall. But no. The plague liquefies your insides, but you don't ever come back to (un)life after that. People probably also jump to the zombie conclusion because Doomsday involves the infected Scotland being walled off, and everybody knows Scotland is full of zombies already. [Rabid Doll]

So what's the most hardcore post-apocalyptic movie of all time? The answer probably won't surprise you...
In this chart, "warlords" refers to paramilitary leaders as well as organized thugs. "Degraded culture" means our culture has been reduced to shreds: there's the crappy Shakespeare performance in The Postman, and (scarier) Will Smith memorizing Shrek in Legend. "Weird power systems" means a jury-rigged power generator. Bonus points if it runs on pig shit.

Sanders, author of Celluloid Skyline, says "everybody" thought there would be no more images of New York's destruction after Sept. 11. But the New York skyline makes too tempting a target for film-makers. NYC provides a "yardstick" for the scale of destruction, and is meaningful to overseas audiences in a way that Chicago or St. Louis just aren't.

Then we get to the crack-smoking portion of Sanders' quotes in the Times article:

In contrast to I Am Legend — which like The Omega Man (1971) is based on a Richard Matheson novel — the Cloverfield images verge on being tasteless, Mr. Sanders said. "They are playing on feelings not just about New York as civic symbol but on the shock of Sept. 11," he said. "To some degree, that's not fair ball."

I'm not sure which part of his statement is weirder. The idea that there's a "tasteful" way to show millions of people dying, or the idea that audiences can't tell the difference between real destruction and movie spectacle. Actually, I know: it's the notion that I Am Legend wasn't pure 9/11 porn, which it was. (How many times does Will Smith use the phrase "Ground Zero" in that movie again?)

Still, I'm beginning to understand why director Francis Lawrence decided to make I Am Legend look less post-apocalyptic and more nature-park. If you actually cut loose in your fantasy movie and show real destruction and havoc, then people will accuse you of being an impolite bounder, not fit for good society.

Luckily, the problem will solve itself. America won't be the world's main superpower much longer, and NYC won't be the world's leading city. Soon, people will be much more interested in seeing Shanghai or Seoul destroyed than NYC anyway.

[New York Times]

I Am Legend concept art from Warner Bros.

So much of the look of I Am Legend was outdoors. How much of that was designed in advance?

We illustrated it or key-framed it. It was an illustration of the area that we were dressing. We conceptualized how much we could visually do practically, and how it was going to be augmented in the computer.

Some of the concept art sketches look very painterly, especially the evacuation scenes.

Some of the early concepts were ... entirely created as an illustration, and then as we found the practical location, we took a picture of the location and augmented the location, and added what we needed to add to it. And altered the sky and added a grainier texture to the look.

Did you watch Omega Man?

A little bit. There was the original, with Vincent Price, and then Omega Man. It was kind of a take on both of them. But also the director Francis Lawrence wanted to make it feel like it was three years later, but it was not an apocalyptic environment. But nature takes over.

Some of the original concept art looks really bombed out. There are buildings that are just skeletons of metal.

As I came on... it was [decided] not to look so apocalyptic. It was kind of a mixture, [with] a hint of what happened in the midst of the chaos, and then nature taking over. It's been three years since the virus and the town has been blocked out. So rather than having it like Omega Man, with the streets littered with trash and stuff... things are biodegradable. Nature takes over, cleans and moves things around.

Parts of it are quite idyllic and beautiful. What was the reason for deciding to make it look less post-apocalyptic?

Not to look like all the others, and also it's a combination of rather than being him in this post-apocalyptic world, it's the natural world taking over. Nature's evolving.

Did you have anything to do with designing the mutants?

A little bit. Originally the concept was to do it live action, and there was a lot of pre-concept work done early on. And then as it didn't quite play out [as] they wanted it to. It became part of the digital world. So I was involved in some of the meetings [about] how to make the creatures or monsters still human, but a little more defined in its body structure and a little more elongated.

Did the original production designer leave because of the decision to make the film look less post-apocalyptic?

Oh no. No, not at all. It just had to do with personal family stuff.

So what are you working on now?

I'm working on Fast And The Furious 4.

[MovieMarketingMadness]

The true horror in I Am Legend, and other stories like it, is having to watch what happens to people when they're robbed of society. It's no accident that Mary Shelley, author of horror-scifi classic Frankenstein, later wrote a post-apocalyptic book called The Last Man. Like many storytellers in the genre, she knew that no monster is scarier than a human being without companions.

Often the aloneness monster rears its head in post-apocalyptic scifi: New Zealand indie Quiet Earth tortures us with fear when our protagonist discovers he's the last guy on the planet; and the masterful 28 Days Later amps up the fear right away when the hero awakens to find himself alone in the middle of an abandoned London. Possibly the most desolate portrait of this aloneness comes in Vernor Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime, where a handful characters who can travel forward in time find that they've "jumped" to a future where humans are mysteriously gone. The time-travelers head to the future in longer and longer jumps, trying to reach a world where apes or spiders have evolved into intelligent life that can keep them company. But it doesn't happen. The sun just grows older and dimmer, and the lost humans never cure their species-loneliness.

Of course, there's being completely alone and then there's being "the only one." Being completely alone can sometimes be peaceful, as Ripley demonstrates in Alien when she crawls into her pod after ejecting the alien into space. But being the only human left in a world of mutants, super-evolved apes, or alien invaders - that's more typical in scifi horror. It forms the basis of often-retold stories like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and countless Alien ripoffs (often little more than slasher movies in space).

Still, no matter what horrifying creature menaces that army of one, the true terror lurking beneath the surface is the loss of protective community. This isn't a fear that humans reserve for themselves, by they way. The scary parts of E.T. (and yes, there are some) have to do with E.T. being a castaway who is vulnerable on a world dominated by homo sapiens. And those who read Frankenstein know that what makes the reanimated man into a monster is his realization that he's alone among creatures who want him destroyed.
Image from Marooned in Realtime book cover by Stephen Martiniere.

Famous names: Harlan Ellison, Don Johnson, L.Q. Jones, Jason Robards

Crunchy goodness: 4

Sights you'll never unsee: Semen. Extracting. Machine.

Life lesson: Take it from David Berkowitz: always listen to the dog.

Deadliest spoiler: She was a girl of impeccable taste.

Review at BadMovies.org