On a lonely road at 4 a.m., a police officer has set up a road block and is stopping cars from going any farther in either direction. He stops an old man and his granddaughter, a man driving an eighteen-wheeler and the hitchhiker he picked up, a rich boozy man and his girlfriend, a married couple and a man on a scooter. After getting messages over his radio, he tells everyone that the roads need to be clear because the cities were being evacuated because of an impending nuclear attack. The officer decides they will use the truck trailer as a bomb shelter. As they prepare, there are a lot of tensions among the people.This is Not a Test is an awful movie for a lot of reasons. This movie appears to have been shot on a budget of about $13. No one here can act and there is certainly no direction being done. The movie is static and stifling because there is only one location. You never leave the lonely road for the entire film. The set up makes no sense. If the roadblock is being set up to keep the roads clear to evacuate the cities, why block traffic both ways? If cars are going to be coming from both directions, where are they going? And how exactly would the four cars the cop pulled over have clogged the roads? How is the truck trailer going to hold up to a nuclear blast? They ask the cop how long they will have to stay in the truck and he says about 2 weeks. 2 weeks? The half-life of plutonium is something like 5000 years. The granddaughter, for an unexplained reason, does not want to get in the truck so she, the guy on the scooter and grandpa run off down the road. Oh right, that's how you survive a nuclear explosion: you just outrun it. Eventually grandpa remembers a cave where the two young people can hide while he sacrifices himself to the bomb. Hey gramps, you couldn't of thought of the cave an hour ago while everyone was piling into a useless trailer? I could go on and on about the reasons this film is terrible, but I won't.

This is more of a stage play than a blockbuster movie, and has the elements of drama that make it rise.It deals with a policeman, or a deputy as he calls himself, armed with shotgun and pistol, performing his duty at a road block. Blindly, he carries out his orders, and seems to be part of a system, but we gradually find he is a tyrant who is making up his own system.It turns out that the road block is because of an impending nuclear strike, and the setting is well over 25 miles away from the city and strategic military centers, but also smack dab in the center of them.The other characters come across as clichés to the naive, but they aren't. In fact, neither is the officer. Unfortunately, this is still the way people panic, trying to appear sensible, but in fact like chickens with their heads cut off. Those who laugh the most at the silliness mark themselves as most likely to crack themselves. Only by facing the reality of Fear can someone hope to be as sensible as the trio who actually have a chance of escaping a horrid fate.SPOILER HERE: Three characters, local people, soon realize the mania of the cop and devise their own survival plan. Two of them obviously survive the ending, and even in 1962 it was obvious they survived. This steps on a lot of people's toes, because these two don't fall into the mode of what modern hate mongering audiences like to see survive, but sorry, those are the facts. This comes across as a very intriguing drama. And the characters only seem far fetched to those who've never been in danger. They are frighteningly realistic. Even the events aren't that far fetched today. This is a highly underrated piece. And the lesson to learn isn't so much how to have a chance to survive disaster (although that is shown also), but how to survive the lunacy of those who have authority.

To understand the importance of this film, and one or two others like it, please remember that at the time this film was made, the US government was still insisting that a simple wooden board could save one from the deadly effects of a nuclear blast. I still remember the drills in grammar school - in 1962 (2 years after this film was made), the drill was to duck under our desks. A year later, it was finally admitted that maybe a concrete wall would be needed, so we were filed out into the hall and sat on the floor with our arms over our heads - the placement of the arms were to weaken the effects of fall-out.This is not a great, or even good, film. It's cheap, it's underdirected, underacted, underlit, underdesigned in every way. And of course there's the unnecessary dash of pure exploitation - drunkenness, lust, bad attitude. And the cop is a hoot by any standards, although let us admit the courage of the writer to make him a complete fool as far as the A-Bomb and his untrustworthy government are concerned.But that, after all, is the real importance of the film. Only four years later, Barry Goldwater ran on the promise that he wouldn't hesitate to use the A-bomb - in Vietnam, Cuba, what the hell, Alabama, if the Civil Rights movement got violent."Nuke 'em, nuke 'em," we still hear the chant, from irresponsible lard-heads who have not the slightest idea how even one or two badly placed bombs would destroy their lives forever - presuming they survived.So, surprisingly - a historically important film, worth a glance.

This is Not A Test is no masterpiece. But, it's not a bad movie either. In fact, I will argue that it's rather well made. It is essentially an elongated Twilight Zone episode combining elements of Martian in a Diner with The Shelter and Maple Street. Many here ridicule this film saying it's horribly done, bad acting, etc. This is wholly incorrect. Most self appointed experts on films commenting here and other places often complain in like deed and manner, using the same phrases and complaints. This film was shot, composed, scored, and sound recorded professionally, albeit with a lower budget than A pictures. This film was shot with skill. The sound is without any noticeable errors, drops, or sound asymmetry, with dialog, Foley, score, incidental music doing what they are supposed to do. Comparing this film to Ed Wood's is way off base. Wood's films are very poorly made (and lovable). Too many times, people trash old films making clichéd generalizations that it's 'crap' or 'shoestring budget' or has 'wooden acting' etc. I'd wager those who make such comments have never made a movie, or probably anything else creative in their lives, certainly not on a scale of a motion picture, even a lower budget one. Sorry, Youtube videos don't count. Such people, and we have a lot of them these days, find it easy to make such blanket statements. Ignore them. For it is the easiest thing in the world to ridicule something as if you are an authority, and it's the most foolish thing in the world to believe it. I'm not saying this film is great. It's classic B movie drive-in fare. But, that doesn't mean that skill wasn't involved, or that professionals didn't do their best with what they had to work with to put an entertaining picture on the big screen. I urge you, if you care, to just take any shot in the film, pick any one, or any scene, and look where the camera was placed, what angle, how is it composed? What can you see in the shot, does the camera move, and if so, is it smoothly done? How are the shots mixed? Does the variety of divergent shots create a feeling you can describe? How is the mixture of shots set up to build tension? Are close ups used? Long shots? Mid shots? Two shots? Overhead shots, low angles? Thru windows, around objects? Dolly shots? Crane shots? Moving vehicle shots? What shots were done in a studio? How many did it take to complete a scene?How are the actors' eye lines? Do they match up, or are they looking in the wrong direction, wrong angle, wrong side of the frame? Do they move off their marks? Did they flub their lines? How is the wardrobe? Do they look "wardrobed"? How about their hair? Does their hair change suddenly shot to shot, as is often the case when continuity is not managed well? How is the cutting? The editing? Does it make sense? Is it convincing that things are happening in real time, even though a 1 minute scene may have taken all night or one week or month of nights to shoot? Did the editor develop a rhythm within each scene, and an overall one for the entire story? Were sound bridges used, where actors' lines, or sound effects cross over visual cuts? Were many lines delivered off camera, so we can see reactions to the lines from the other players? How are the sound effects used? Are they convincing? Or out of sync? The crickets? Do they suddenly stop for no reason shot by shot, or are the sound effects consistently maintained? Is the police car radio convincing? How about the static from the other cars' radios? Door slams? Were they foleyed well? Do you see any mic booms? Light set ups? Can you even tell how they lit each scene, so we could see what we should see and not see what we shouldn't? There is no large lampposts, yet we believe we should see them. How is this violation of reality accomplished so the viewer doesn't have it ruin the illusion. The above is only the tip of the iceberg of what a filmmaker goes through for each second, each frame of film that is shot. Remember this is film, not video. If you are the type of person who makes fun of B/W movies, old TV shows, music made before you were a teenager, then don't bother watching it. You've got greater issues to deal with and you need all the time you have left on earth to deal with them. If on the other hand you are one who has an open mind, and enjoys fun movies, then take a peak. You may like it. It may stay with you. You may surprise yourself. One of the worst things to ever happen to cinema, to old movies in particular (and all movies become old movies eventually) was Mystery Science Theater. Even though it was very funny, and a good concept - we often did the exact same thing in college way before MST did it, as did probably many of you out there - it cued many young people into thinking ALL old movies, ALL B movies should be made fun of. This was a dire mistake and has transformed into a tragedy. It has brought upon us an avalanche of cynical so-called experts who strive to elicit the end-all cut or put-down of such fare as This is Not A Test. The challenge in life is not to find things to ridicule, but rather to find the beauty in things others can't see, and maybe, with a little luck, show it to them. Good luck.