I've never heard of Ray Milland but I will never watch another one of his movies. This atrocity starts with a family leaving to go camping at 4 am and they don't even try to make it look dark. They soon find out a nuclear bomb has destroyed Los Angeles and now they must fight to survive. Milland drones on about things that don't make sense, when he's not lying. At one point they can't pull out on to a road because there is a non-stop line of traffic.He dumps a bucket of gasoline on the road and throws a book of lit matches at it like a girl. The ensuing inferno instantly ignites another car, pay no attention to the liquid on the car. It just gets worse and worse and you hope everyone dies.Then it ends,WITHOUT an ending. Not only is the daughters rape scene the best part of the movie but by the time it happens, you'll be happy she gets raped. I would say watch it just to see how stupid it is.I gave it 2 stars because you can't give 1/2 stars,I'd like to give it 1 1/2.

Whatever drew Ray Milland to direct and star in this piece of junk? Was it the chance to direct? Had his career hit a low point?The real blame goes to the writer. The script is terrifically plodding and predictable, clunking from one incident to the next with no finesse whatsoever. The dialogue--my god, the dialogue!--is completely cringeworthy. Most of the time it's just functional, but on the rare occasion when it tries to rise to something higher, it becomes ridiculously awkward. Dad tells Mom, "I was looking for the worst in others and found it in myself." Whoa, so pseudo-profound.Niney percent of screen time is given to Milland. Ninety-eight percent of the dialogue is given to him. Frankie Avalon and some young actress play Milland's teenage children--she probably has no more than six lines of dialogue. Apart from lots of "OK" and "Sure" Avalon may have eight or ten lines.Many scenes are shot on sets that are about as convincing as an episode of the Twilight Zone or an early episode of Star Trek. You can hear the voices echoing on the sound stage. The bushes and rocks are only rough approximations of the real things. The lighting is pure studio lighting, without even a pretense of being outdoors.Finally, the music is awful. I know it was the fashion around that time to use a kind of very intrusive jazzy score--like in In the Heat of the Night. But it puts up a wall between you and the action, its blatant artificiality a constant reminder of how false and patched-up the whole production is.For a summer drive-in movie, it might be worth the 25 cents, if it came with a second feature and some good cartoons. But why reviewers here have such good things to say about it, amazes me. It's the worst movie I've seen in a little while.

Panic in Year Zero (1962) aka End of the World CONTAINS SPOILERS The Cuban Missile Crisis ignited an explosion of excellent movies dealing with nuclear holocaust including Fail-Safe (1964), Dr. Strangelove (1964), (Stanley Kubrick's follow-up masterpiece to Paths of Glory (1957) and Lolita (1962), (Spartacus (1960) is very good, but it is what it is)), and The Bedford Incident (1965). The theme was explored from slightly different angles, (Seven Days in May (1964), Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977), Wargames (1983), The Manhattan Project (1986), By Dawn's Early Light (1990)), and with varying degrees of verisimilitude, (A Day Called X (1957), This is not a Test (1962), The War Game (1965), The Day After (1983), Threads (1984)), quite consistently through the end of the Cold War. Most of these movies deal with a big picture view and, at least in part, give a ringside seat to the councils of the decision makers, (at least the local ones in Threads). There are some very good exceptions of course, particularly Malevil (1981) and Testament (1983).Panic in Year Zero appeared a year before the missile crisis and follows a family of four, who happen to be driving away from Los Angeles on a vacation when the city is destroyed, as they try to survive the growing chaos in the surrounding areas. An AI exploitation picture, the low budget precluded dramatic scenes of large scale carnage or destruction, but allows at times for a surprisingly intelligent examination of some of the moral issues about survival, self defense and self preservation. (For instance, Ray Milland (who also directed, by the way) has to overcome his son's, (Avalon), initial reluctance to use a rifle; later, Avalon is actually eager to use it. As soon as Milland sees this, he scolds him and makes clear that he must be prepared to use the gun if necessary, but he should never want to or enjoy doing so and must always be on guard against his own inclinations that way.)Neither Fail-Safe nor Dr. Strangelove, (and other than by implication On the Beach (1959), for that matter - which Arch Oboler did better in Five (1951), in my opinion), show weapon effects, so their minimal use here is not an issue in and of itself. The problem is how much they, and the social dislocation, are attenuated: there is no sense of real chaos because the movie never fully allows the thin veneer of civilization to flake off, (something done very effectively in the last fifteen minutes of Miracle Mile (1988)), and so the theme of these four being the maintainers of ethical standards amongst a collapsed society rings false. And in the same sense, the finale finds the protagonists essentially having passed through the crisis and gives the movie rather a happy ending. My guess is AI, as usual, wanted to give the audience a good entertaining scare but not seriously frighten anyone.Still, a very worthwhile movie in many ways - certainly worth watching if one enjoys these types of dramas - and deserving of inclusion in the Nuclear Disaster film canon. And it's always nice to see Ray Milland acting and directing after he found that weekend he misplaced.XYZ

A family of four leaves Los Angeles for a camping trip just before a nuclear bomb destroys the city. As lawlessness prevails, the father (Ray Milland) must fight to keep his family alive.There is something terribly disjointed about this film. The main cast (including Milland and Frankie Avalon) are great, but they are thrown in a world that does not know whether to worry or not. Right outside the city limits, people seem unable to comprehend that the loss of Los Angeles is bad, and no one panics. Yet, the farther out they get (where civilization is still intact), gangs of hoodlums and hooligans are kidnapping women... what? Les Baxter's score is actually a hindrance to the theme, because he provided nothing but upbeat jazzy riffs. As the world is facing nuclear war, Baxter is ready to party. This is no doubt one of the reasons the film is considered "campy". (In some ways, the music acts as a precursor to the beach party films Avalon would be doing within a couple years.) The lack of blood or even smoke from gunshots was sort of odd, because people would get hit with shotguns and just fall over. At one point, Milland even comments that Avalon has "lost a lot of blood" when the audience sees nothing -- not even torn clothes. There is something quaint and nostalgic about this, but also not very believable.The stand-out role was played by Joan Freeman as Marilyn Hayes, who was traumatized by the murder of her family and being kidnapped by hooligans. For 1962, this is something of a dark role. Not that her acting is incredible, but compared to everyone else...Paul Corupe finds the film to be important in a historical context. He believes the film "was the first to show that the survivors of a nuclear attack may not be as fortunate as you might think." He says that in contrast to bigger films like "On the Beach" (1959), this one "was among the first to play up the potential violence of the situation." Whether this is true or not I cannot say for sure, but assuming Corupe is right, the film deserves to be re-evaluated and possibly forgiven for its campy shortcomings.