Disaster Film Olympiad: Countdown To Looking Glass

Countdown To Looking Glass is an unlikely name for a film but it has a similarly unlikely premise: financial instability caused by a banking collapse suddenly intensifies the significance of a regional dispute in the Middle East, one that quickly descends into a proxy war between the Soviet Union and NATO forces which threatens to spill over into a global conflagration. None of this could ever happen.

As the new Soviet-backed, some say puppet, regime get down to business in Oman, the Western news media swing into action to help placate and inform the viewing trillions. The responsible souls of the major news outlets understand the significance of their role and would never dream of trying to spread panic or propaganda. They are our true heroes.

The disaster movie-as-faux-real-time-news-coverage is not an unusual concept, nor did it begin with Countdown To Looking Glass - 1983's Special Bulletin is a notable earlier example. However, Countdown has a few interesting twists and tweaks to the format designed to keep things fresh and interesting. Firstly, they engage the services of real life contributors: veteran American TV news stalwarts Eric Sevareid and Nancy Dickerson both appear as themselves as a senior analyst and senior reporter respectively. Additional opinion is provided by US Senator (and five-time former Presidential candidate) Eugene McCarthy, defence analyst Lincoln Bloomfield and Congressman (and all-round right wing diarrhoea cannon) Newt Gingrich. Although it is perhaps debatable as to the exact degree which each of the above understood what was actually going on, it nevertheless adds an interesting vérité to proceedings.

Don Tobin reports in Countdown To Looking Glass, shortly before kissing his ass goodbye

The second change to the format is that the real time news coverage is broken up by portions of melodrama, dealing with the real lives of both the lead anchor Don Tobin (played by Canadian news veteran Patrick Watson) and Washington reporter Dorian Waldorf (Helen Shaver). We watch on day by day as an increasingly anxious Tobin yaks on to his wife about the likely outcome of the unfolding crisis and, more significantly for the story, we see Waldorf's romantic relationship with a White House staffer lead to exclusives, high anxiety and heartbreak. Having gone to the trouble of getting real world contributors to weigh in on an entirely fictional story, these soap opera-style interludes could have been an eccentric move on the part of the producers. But oddly, it works: Shaver's story in particular has some very interesting and incisive points to make about the way that news events and the news media have become so interdependent as to have become self-sustaining; the exclusive story she uncovers from inside the Oval Office seems to have the potential to help defuse the spiralling situation only to be held back by the station's editorial policy.

It's all so grindingly predictable. This would ordinarily make for a damning condemnation of any film, but in this case it is not: the unfolding news coverage portions of the piece are done well enough that any despondency you feel tends to be despondency at the worst excesses of global politics and its vainglorious pride, its high ideals at the expense of the lives of its people. Sobering stuff, not least when - on the cusp of a nuclear exchange in the Strait of Hormuz - Newt Gingrich justifies the action as being crucial to the United States' vital stewardship of freedom and democracy around the world. Gallingly, this is something which required no acting talent at all on the Congressman's part because it also happens to be what Gingrich (in company with all of his contemporaries on the right of American politics) really thinks. Thanks, America.

Countdown To Looking Glass gets a spine tingling EIGHT out of ten Disaster Points.

Disaster Film Olympiad - Volcano

Los Angeles is a fascinating place. Most of the turbulence that afflicts the city is social - gang violence, racial tension, pro-footballers murdering their wives and getting away with it, etc. - but the potential for far a more elemental catastrophe lurks under every crib, pimp wagon or Ben Affleck's house. The San Andreas fault is responsible, the meeting of the Pacific and North American continental tectonic plates. It makes coastal California ripe earthquake territory and when they strike, they tend to be the sort of earthquakes that do more than rearrange your gnomes.

Of course, Los Angeles is also the home to the American film industry and there is nothing Hollywood enjoys more than occasionally reminding itself that it could at any moment be naught but a smoking crater in the ground, just like Kevin Smith's house. It's all part of that particular deal with the devil that movie stars make with their conscience as the man arrives with the next lorry load of money.

Volcano was released in 1997, part of the brief pre-millennium disaster film renaissance which also saw us clenching our buttocks through Dante's Peak, Twister, Armageddon and Deep Impact. Also notable to anyone who might perhaps be endlessly watching disaster films for no real reason is that the director was Mick Jackson, the Briton who made Threads. Fortunately, Volcano is nowhere near as brutal. Although I don't live in Los Angeles, so maybe it is. The fact that John Travolta potentially considers Volcano to be more frightening than Threads is the take home portion from this paragraph.

Anyway, the earthquake that I had been warning everybody could happen in Los Angeles happens. Our hero, Mike Roark of the city's Emergency Management Committee, puts aside his much-needed family holiday to make sure nothing dreadful has happened: one of the Os in the Hollywood sign may have fallen over, for instance, or Warren Beatty's toilet might be leaking. His decision has long-reaching consequences for some of the city engineering workers, who are cooked to death while inspecting a storm drain. This is an unlikely thing to happen, but Roark takes it in his stride. Roark is an easy man to have sympathy towards. He's middle-aged and craggly, gruff and curt yet possessed of an undeniable twinkly oaky Southern charm. He is a bit like Tommy Lee Jones, so the film's casting director secured something of a coup when they acquired the services of Tommy Lee Jones to essay the role.

The itch in Roark's knickers is Dr. Amy Barnes, a geologist. Being a geologist is comfortably one of the most genuinely perilous jobs that one can have while still being excruciatingly boring conversation at a dinner party, a dichotomy which tends to make them peculiarly strident people. Barnes is convinced that the earthquake has caused the formation of a volcano right under the centre of the city. Roark is sympathetic to these concerns, but he can't just start throwing tax payers' money around without evidence. Evidence that Barnes, to her own frustration and no doubt that of the people who have to talk to her at her friends' dinner parties, is unable to gather.

Fortunately, Barnes has a key ally in her quest: Mother Nature. The volcano that she had been predicting to everyone could volcano erupts right under the La Brea tar pits, causing hundreds of dollars worth of damage to the fibreglass mammoths and also pumping boiling lava all over the place. Wilshire Boulevard, traditionally given over to being the main arterial road for the largest city in California, becomes a regular shit show of burning vehicles, stuck underground trains and fifth degree burns. It's a lawsuit waiting to happen. To her credit, Dr. Barnes continues to work for the good of the Angelenos, where most of us would take to the highest vantage point immediately available and look smug.

There are two ways that this sort of film can go: they either deal with a pre-existing adversarial relationship being reconciled in the crucible of extreme circumstance, or the nascent union between two people being thrown together by events. Volcano is the latter and if the sex is as impressive as Roark and Barnes' teamwork, there may yet be further earth tremors in southern California. Using carefully placed detonations of explosive devices, they manage to channel the lava flow through the city's network of subterranean tunnels and into the Pacific Ocean where it would presumably solidify and form a place even drier, hotter and more exclusive than Los Angeles itself, much to the chagrin of the Hollywood elite.

I don't know enough about volcanology to know whether any of this exotic bill of fayre is likely or even possible, but I know enough about disaster films to say that this is a perfectly serviceable one. It ticks all of the traditional generic boxes - relationships are explored and developed, people are roasted to a crisp and the special effects department get to just go nuts - as well as retaining its own personal charm. Volcano gets SIX out of ten Disaster Points.

Disaster Film Olympiad: The Day The Earth Caught Fire

There are two things of which simply no good can ever possibly come: nuclear weapons and the international dateline. When they combine, the overall effect is inevitably catastrophic for all in its path. Unfortunately, these were the precise confluence of circumstances that were to assail the hard-working staff at the offices of The Daily Express in 1961, on a day... THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE!

For years, man has yearned to destroy the Sun...

Typical tabloid hyperbole, that. The Earth did not literally catch fire, but it was nevertheless sickening for something pretty serious. The Day The Earth Caught Fire is an entertaining and considered Cold War fable that warns that the dangers of nuclear weapons - or not checking your calendar - stretch far beyond the obvious. The United States and the Soviet Union, now both building the spiffiest, most powerful hydrogen bombs that modern technology can muster, somehow contrive to each test them simultaneously on opposite ends of the globe without having first checked to see how time zones work. The overall effect throws the Earth off of its normal orbit and into an inevitable collision course with the Sun.

This annoys everybody. The new jaunty tilt of our celestial home causes havoc with the seasons, as drought, heatwaves, storms and floods beset countries quite unprepared to deal with the consequences. The action centres on the newspaper offices of central London, where to call the weather all to cock would barely do the situation justice. The temperature soars, causing a catastrophic drought, ruinously damaging thunderstorms and freak fogs. To be honest, it's pretty similar to what the weather is like in the 21st Century, although it is best to put that thought to the back of your mind since the upshot of all this is: we're doomed. The hardworking Daily Express staffers - motivated by the possibility of a worldwide scoop and powered only by cynicism, lukewarm Coca Cola and a bar tab that looks like Jeremy Hunt's parliamentary expenses claim - do their best to get to the bottom of the story, even though it turns their newspaper into a shrill, weather-obsessed, catastrophe rag. Which obviously could never happen.

It is an unusual disaster film, but it doesn't suffer at all for it: the main characters are reactive, rather than active; resigned rather than rallying. The film neatly captures the constrictive inevitability of a society that has contrived to destroy itself as we all feared it would. There are no heroes, just people being people. Some bad, some mad, but mostly good-hearted. Of course, a film is still always only a film, so a few compromises have to be made: of course our leading man Peter Stenning would take this opportunity to begin a torrid romantic entanglement with Jeannie Craig, a secretary from the Met Office. And naturally he will end up defending her honour from a bunch of feral beatnik water terrorists by engaging in fisticuffs in her apartment. These are things that happen in every film, no matter what the genre or the stakes.

On the whole, however, it is an absorbing and entertaining way to spend 90 minutes. Well, entertaining when one considers the oddly prescient nature of the subject matter: as I watched the film the sky outside was purple and the hail was falling upwards. Particularly pleasing is its ambiguous ending, as the dual forces of science and irony combine to decide the only way to save Earth from a certain fiery demise is to right its place in the heavens with... more atomic blasts. What will happen? The church bell ringers will be putting in for double overtime, if nothing else. It's hard enough ringing bells in normal temperatures and when adequately hydrated. More important still is that I have successfully managed to write the first ever retrospective review of The Day The Earth Caught Fire that doesn't mention it features a pre-super duper super stardom Michael Caine, playing a copper.

Daily Express journalist Peter Stenning (Edward Judd) in The Day The Earth Caught Fire: what would Princess Diana do?

More worthy of note even than the revelation that Michael Caine has to eat food and pay his gas bill are the special effects. Considering the technological limitations of the time they stand up very well indeed. Particularly stunning are the vistas of London as a sun-bleached, dried out and abandoned husk - all made by the matte painting mastery of Les Bowie. Film making has become less of an art since computers came along, in many ways. Sigh.

The Day The Earth Caught Fire gets a smouldering EIGHT out of 10 Disaster Points.

Disaster Film Olympiad: Flight 90: Disaster on the Potomac

Strange though it may seem, real-life disaster tends not to be a particularly fertile ground for the creation of disaster movies. Reality tends to either be too tame for entertainment or too horrific for imagining, plus it has the unfortunate habit of continually confounding any conventional narrative structure, through its dedication to happenstance and dumb luck. It's more of a challenge to build a decent story arc when historical accuracy dictates that the character you have spent time establishing has a date with destiny at prescribed stage in events. Yet take too many liberties and your film isn't worth a brass farthing: a disaster film can either trade on its creativity or its adherence to reality, there's really no in-between.

Flight 90: Disaster On The Potomac's hands were tied from the beginning. The decision of whose stories to feature has already been taken by history, the ascription of the values that arose from them a done deal. The result is an odd mixture: the preamble is a bit boring, but only in the way that everyday life can be a bit boring. The drama is fraught and tense, but no more so than the historical event on which it is based. Essentially you are left with a compromise: either a news report with additional characterisation or a soap opera with limited dramatic license.

The event on which the film was based took place in Washington DC in January 1982. Air Florida's Flight 90 was scheduled to fly from the capital to Tampa, Florida. The weather was as wintry as a January day in Washington is wont to be, and take off was delayed by an hour and three-quarters due to snow and ice. This was not good news for the real people involved in this incident but its value to the screenwriter cannot be understated: a delay is prime territory for expositional dialogue. Lives are fleshed out and the stakes made abundantly clear. Were I a normal person, I would surely have started to relate to these people, their hopes and dreams.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, the pilots of Flight 90 were inexperienced at dealing with such arctic conditions and their failure to properly de-ice the wings prior to take-off led to the deaths of 74 of the 79 people on board. Their hobbled aeroplane failed to reach adequate speed on the runway, stalled and swiped into the 14th Street Bridge, killing an additional four people stuck on the ground in a snowbound Washington DC traffic jam. The Boeing 737 ended up in the frozen Potomac River below, as though it were nought but a common salmon. The stragglers bob to the surface and their battle for survival begins.

The film is fairly formulaic, cheap and cheesy stuff but it makes a number of key decisions which perhaps raise it above other examples of its type. Most notable amongst these is the fact that the crash itself is not graphically reconstructed: a neat reminder that this is a character piece rather than a Hollywood blockbuster, that each of the characters you are watching was a person you might have bumped into on the street not two years before had life taken a few different turns. The fact that five of the people involved in the accident still were people you could bump into on the street is the film's real point for celebration, rather than any florid displays of special effects mayhem. It's an admirable decision, one which arguably costs the film in terms of its overall effectiveness but saves its soul.

Alternatively you could forget everything I just said and look at the official movie poster. Cor lummy.

It is not, by any means, a great film. It is not really a good film or a bad film, either. As a faithful account of a traumatic day and as a memorial to the good in humanity that such days tend to reveal, it does pretty much everything that you would assume it should. Flight 90: Disaster On The Potomac gets FIVE out of ten disaster points.

Disaster Film Olympiad: Outbreak

If there's been an outbreak, it is probably monkeys. It usually is. They're dirty. They wee all over their hands and then touch all the bananas in the bowl, not just the ones they were going to eat, and then you've got AIDS and Ebola all in your mouth in one go.

Zaire, 1967: a devastating virus with Ebola-like symptoms called Motaba has ravaged the camp in the jungle where the US army - who were propping up the CIA-sponsored coup d'etat of General Mobutu - are based. It's bad stuff, this Motaba virus, one of those nearly always lethal viral haemmorhagic fever things that makes you unwelcome company at all but the most unruly church fetes. In fact, the mortality rate and its infectiousness are so high that the American government enact Operation Clean Sweep, which sees the afflicted area cleansed by the dropping of a massive incendiary device. Which is what happens when you don't have socialised healthcare.

In spite of the rigour and unimpeachable moral standards of their decision, by 1995 Motaba is rearing its ugly head again, making every fart a mortal risk. Unfortunately, greed and military cover-ups abound, resulting in a monkey who is a carrier of the virus being shipped to the United States for use in animal testing, which is wrong on any number of levels.

In fact, it turns out that karma is a stone cold bitch. The monkey busily infects everyone who crosses her path, probably via the old wee banana shim-sham. By the time she is smuggled out of the Biotech lab by Patrick Dempsey, to be sold as a pet on the black market in Cedar Creek, California, there's a whole world of hurt brewing across the continental United States. Not least for the kind of selfless, hazmat-suited, wrecklessly brave infectious disease specialists whose job it is to sort out this kind of mess. People like Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo, a recently divorced couple who until this point thought that their biggest problem was who got custody of their dogs. With the military high-ups planning a dastardly repeat of Operation Clean Sweep on home ground, our heroes (by this stage in various stages of infectiousness, naturally) face a race against time to identify, find and capture Patient Zero, get hold of their juices and fashion an antidote. Preferably one that can be administered with a hosepipe. Plot twist: Patient Zero is, as you may already know, a monkey. Who lives in a tree.

Outbreak is the kind of film that you can put together like a jigsaw. Everything you are expecting to happen happens and roughly in that order. There are moustache-twirlingly evil career military men who view humanity as nothing but a series of statistics and calculations of collateral damage. There are good hearted scientists doing battle with a lethal yet invisible foe. There's panic, there is death, pestilence and gruesome chapped lip make-up. Kevin Spacey - then at the height of the part of his movie career where he'd die in every film in which he appeared - also duly obliges, falling victim to the kind of torn hazmat suit japes in the laboratory which would probably have been reasonably funny had the stakes not been quite so high.

Oddly, it is no less of a film for it. The thrills and spills (mostly bodily fluids in the latter case) are ramped up at a pleasing pace, while the fundamental truth that the ins and outs of immunology is probably a little complicated and dry a subject for a Hollywood blockbuster are adroitly sidestepped with a neat blend of expositional graphics and SHOUTING. It's a familiar old warm jumper of a film, one which rewards repeat viewings.

All of this and the monkey survives. Kevin Spacey should perhaps have had a word with their agent. Outbreak gets an all-your-organs-are-liquifying-and-pouring-out-of-every-hole SEVEN out of 10 disaster points.

Disaster Film Olympiad: The Day After

I'm going to Kansas City, as Little Richard put it. Kansas City here I come. It's not just pioneering rock and roll heroes, either. All sorts of things are on their way there, including - in November 1983 - intercontinental ballistic missiles.

It was the early 1980s. The Cold War was at its height and the situation between the great powers of East and West was at its most precarious since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. In an unlikely turn of events, Ronald Reagan was in the White House. In an unlikelier one still, he was in there because he was the President. His Strategic Missile Defence initiative - known by the colloquial name of the Star Wars system - promised the possibility of a winnable nuclear war. It was an escalation in an arms race that had already gotten wildly out of control and tensions rose in tandem. After all, total and instantaneous global destruction was what was at stake.

Both of these ways of thinking were the inspiration for The Day After, the highest rated American made-for-television film of all time. Its name referred to the fact that, rather than the widely assumed cessation of all life on Earth, there would be a day after any nuclear conflict. The film set about essaying how the post-nuclear world may turn out to be with the action centring around a number of families in and around the area of Kansas City, Missouri and the campus of Kansas University at Lawrence, Kansas.

As a confrontation arose between the East and West at the East German border, the inhabitants of this hotbed of military hardware suddenly became aware that large pieces of it were starting to fly away. As one observer grimly notes, this means that the corresponding ones in the Soviet Union would, too, be on their way. As good a time as any to make sure your will is fully up to date. Upon their arrival, many people and places in the major urban areas are instantaneously anhailated, leaving a decimated band of stragglers battling for their own and each other's survival.

Steve Guttenberg as Steve Klein in The Day After (1983). You're not looking well, chief.

The Day After retains the majority of its ability to shock, appal and frighten, even from an historical distance of almost a third of a century. Many of its scenes are burnt into the minds of all who have seen it. For many, not even his sterling work in Police Academy or Three Men and a Baby will have superseded The Day After as Steve Guttenberg's standout role. A powerful legacy by anyone's standards.

That is far from The Day After's only social or cultural impact. Although its great contemporary - the British-made 1984 film Threads - remains the more affecting and chilling film, The Day After is the more outstanding and lasting piece. President Reagan watched the finished product a few days before it was released to the public and noted in his diary that it left him "greatly depressed". He would later cable Nicholas Meyer, the film's director, after the signing of a nuclear arms reduction treaty with the Soviet Union telling him that his film's importance to its successful completion should not be overlooked. Threads, a film which has nevertheless chilled the marrow of all that have ever encountered it, cannot boast such wider historical significance.

The most striking thing about The Day After, though, is its bipartisanship. The film caused considerable controversy - both before and after its release - for its refusal to point the finger at the Soviet Union for being the people who fired first. During the production, the US Defense Department refused to provide any stock footage of nuclear explosions or other support after its makers refused to back down from its policy of non-specificity and after the film was seen by the public, The New York Post newspaper decried Meyer as a dastardly red, a fifth columnist who was successfully doing all of the USSR's propaganda work for them. Such ideological wrangles have lessened in the intervening years but, to prove Meyer and his production team's instincts correct, their decision still affords the film a great universality: a sense that nationality or politics cease to matter when it is humanity itself that is at stake.

The Day After is a film of many standout moments; its sense of sadness, frustration and futility remains quite undiminished even thirty years on. It is a film that perhaps doesn't chill or frighten in quite the same way as Threads does, but it comes as close as anyone need dare. The Day After gets a shattering 9 out of 10 Disaster Points.

Disaster Film Olympiad: Testament

If anyone has ever considered what life would be like after a nuclear war and somehow reached the conclusion that it wouldn't be shit, an hour and a half in the company of 1983's Testament should see you right. While the film foregoes many of our favourite nuclear disaster tropes: running around, screaming, urination, burns, viciously imploding buildings and enforcement of the harsh strictures of martial law; it remains peculiarly affecting, in spite of - or very probably because of - its gentle, quiet, meditative tone.

The Wetherly family are a fairly normal bunch, a married couple living with their three children in the (alas made-up) town of Hamelin, California. The father is the breadwinner, working a 90 minute drive away in San Francisco. If any of the Wetherlys have cause to be glad of what it about to happen it is surely Tom, who at least won't have to do that commute any more.

Sadly for Tom, the rest of the Wetherlys and everyone else, the commencement of hostilities does more than just interrupt the scheduled episode of Sesame Street. The actual strike is peculiarly restrained for a film of its type: no whizzbangs, no special effects and no hellzapoppin, just a sustained flash of light seen through the living room window.

Testament is a film about dealing with the consequences of that flash. The family and community dynamics to which we have been briefly introduced quickly begin to collapse and decay all around us. Central to the film is Carol Wetherly, Tom's wife and now presumably widow, trying to keep a brave face and keep her family, their standards of behaviour and senses of personal morality together.

Carol and Brad Wetherly post for the annual family portrait photograph, 1984.

Of course this is difficult enough, contending with disrupted utilities and the cessation of regular deliveries of everyday supplies, before one even factors in the unseen plague of radioactive fallout. Desperation quickly takes hold in Hamelin, but it is portrayed as doing so without frenzy; rather it comes about as a result of an insidious, steady suffocation. Of new realities and circumstances removing all of people's other options. It is a sobering look at the unavoidable patheticness of it all. Not even the local school's performance of their previously scheduled rendition of The Pied Piper of Hamelin can raise spirits, if only because the stage is quickly strewn with the teeth, toes and tears of its participants.

The Wetherly children all deal with this new way of life - something which can be shit enough without all this nonsense - in different ways. The eldest son, Brad, finds something of himself, a businesslike maturity that sees him involving himself in caring for the community as best he can. His nascent friendship with the town's elderly ham radio enthusiast is particularly pregnant with pathos.

It is sad that it took such an event for Brad to gain such wisdom and perspective, but his steely visage is neatly contrasted by his sister Mary Liz, who is paralysed with the hopelessness of the situation and regret at what she, on the cusp of womanhood, has surely lost. The scene in which she asks her poor mother what it is like to have it off with a dude is a stark reminder that such conversations are difficult enough, before the onset of widespread leukaemia, shifting norms or looting.

Mary Liz was right to be filled with existential dread: she later succumbs to radiation poisoning, the second of the Wetherly children to do so after the death of Scottie, the youngest. Both are buried in impromptu ceremonies in the front yard, with as much dignity as the exhausted, increasingly traumatised and desperate family can muster.

The whole town, in fact, is being relentlessly devastated by the constricting inevitability of it all. Survivors in varying states of mental distress begin to start thinking getting out to look for anything that has remained beyond their horizons is their only option. Even Kevin Costner, portraying a young father of a baby who dies not long after Scottie, decides that he can't hack it any more, even though he managed to get through Waterworld largely unscathed.

The Wetherlys, too, are beginning to wonder if a radical option might be their best bet. With their number swollen by Larry (a child orphaned by the initial blast) and Hiroshi, a disabled child who was a long-standing friend of the family and who they have now adopted after the demise of his father, the Wetherlys pile into the family station wagon with one eye on committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. Bravely, Carol decides to persevere with living on, which is particularly good news for the children, who had perhaps not had the same idea. We leave them celebrating Brad's birthday in dismally reduced circumstances, quietly determined to face down an uncertain future.

Testament is an unusual example of its genre but it is none less powerful for it; a thoughtful look at the agonising but inescapable decline of human social norms and values in extreme circumstances. Jane Alexander, who played Carol, received a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for her performance, by turns strong, sad, desperate and resolved. Testament gets 8 out of 10 disaster points.

Disaster Film Olympiad: Meteor

There is a solution to every problem. This fundamental truth should pacify us all, particularly when a five-mile wide lump of rock breaks free of the Asteroid Belt and heads our way.

Nuclear weapons get a bad rap, on the whole. Generally speaking, when the nukes get dusted off, there's a feeling of resignation and defeat in the air. How refreshing it is, then, when bulk-watching disaster films to get to one featuring a celestial body threatening all life on earth. All of a sudden the Manhattan Project looks like an insurance policy. Robert Oppenheimer lightens up and appears on The Graham Norton Show joshing with his other guests, Chris Martin and Jada Pinkett-Smith.

Problem: five-mile wide asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Solution: Hercules! Hercules is the United States' contribution to world peace, a satellite in geostationary orbit with 14 100-megaton nuclear warheads pointed at the Soviet Union. It's the kind of thing that makes everyone feel that bit safer. Fortunately, Hercules can be rotated so that its payload points outward and make that asteroid feel the cut of our collective jib.

Uh-oh. Supplementary problem. The USA's top space flotsam science man, who improbably looks and sounds just like noted Scotsman Sean Connery, says that Hercules' death load will be quite insufficient for the task at hand. Like taking Gwyneth Paltrow to an all-you-can-eat chicken buffet.

But remember, there's always a solution. In this particular case it is Peter The Great. Peter The Great is the name of the USSR's peace initiative, floating somewhere above the United States, biding its time and packing serious heat. Of course, these are Hollywood movie Soviets, so they are shifty no-good bastards who initially deny it. But once Sean explains the gravity of the situation, the Russians fess up and a multinational death force of unimaginable destructive magnitude is assembled to blast some serious rock ass.

Of course, the true joy in films like Meteor is that the writers get to have some fun poking holes in the preposterousness of Cold War politics when projected across a broader backdrop. Martin Landau, now seemingly high up in the US military is flabbergasted. You can't let the Soviets into our control centres. They'll steal all the upload codes, not flush the toilet and besides, this measly god damn rock will just break up in the atmosphere. Not even Sean's growling or the firm hand of President Henry Fonda on the tiller can convince him otherwise.

He is not alone. Even after the announcement is made to a largely indifferent world, people seem able to get on with their business with admirable coolness. This air of calm persists until the rock begins to splinter, sending smaller but still devastating meteors crashing to Earth. A Swiss skiing marathon is quite severely disrupted, causing Martin Landau to cast his doubts aside.

As impact day - December 7th, a date which really would live in infamy - arrives, there's much more palpable tension. Sean is swapping his wig for one which is slightly more progressively grey on an hourly basis. Just as the US launch their missiles, a further splinter decimates New York City. First to fall is the World Trade Center, something which could never happen in real life. Unfortunately, New York is also the location of the centre for Earth-saving operations and our heroes are quickly thrust into an unseemly bonus battle for survival with a spectacularly muddy Hudson River.

Meteor is actually a really good little film. I was surprised. Surprised because I've seen enough big budget disaster movies from their golden age of the 1970s to know what to expect. Crap, essentially. Big name stars phoning in a performance, shoddy dialogue and trite situations. Which is not to say I don't love them all; but finding one that is a little better than the norm was a treat nevertheless. My favourite thing was that for once, the all-star cast was, on the whole, very well used. I would certainly have voted for Henry Fonda to be President and the multiple requirements of the Soviet interpreter to be able to speak fluent Russian, be a woman, bewitch Sean Connery AND be a famous film star were admirably met by Natalie Wood. It was a toss up between her and Yul Brynner, presumably. But with Sean Connery already on the payroll, they probably couldn't stretch the wig budget. And of course Trevor Howard is a beknighted astrophysicist ensconced at Jodrell Bank. Of course Trevor Howard! Of course Jodrell Bank!

The only potentially shaky bit of casting is Sean Connery, who I think is supposed to be an American. But we've been here with Connery before. Sean Connery doesn't have a nationality or an accent, per se. He is just Connery. Got to love a bit of Connery. Meteor gets a bold SEVEN out of 10 disaster points.

Disaster Film Olympiad: This Is Not A Test

Where would you like to be when the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles arrive? The wise among you will probably say 200 metres underground in a fully air-conditioned and ventilated concrete and lead-lined bunker complete with its own state-of-the-art filtration and waste disposal systems, plus fresh water, ample food, a reliable generator and varied types of communication technology. The more paranoid of you are already reading this from there. Hello, if you are. Playing the long game is admirable. You may yet have the last laugh, in addition to your agonising case of rickets.

No-one, surely, would choose to be stuck at a roadblock on an interstate highway in California. However, that is the exact scenario in which what one might loosely term the protagonists of This Is Not A Test find themselves; stuck at night in a sullenly over-zealous traffic policeman's dragnet. The object of this police attention is Clint Delany, a man on the run from the law for suspected murder. Aside from a brief skirmish with the wanted man, the group's attention soon turn to the police radio announcing the commencement of hostilities with the Soviet Union.

This comes as a real drag to our motley crew, most of whom had other plans that night. Among their number are a a dolly bird and her beatnik lover who seems to have secured their future financial stability by what were presumably dubious means; a hokey, oaky old grandpappy and his beloved (if shrill) granddaughter; a married couple on their way to holiday in Mexico; and the drivers of the Discount World lorry who had been unwittingly ferrying the hitchhiking outlaw to freedom.

Their truck has a large part to play in proceedings. It is somewhat misleadingly named: a British shop called Discount World would be filled with all manner of remaindered tat, California's Discount World is the kind of store where one might bump into Scrooge McDuck. Every single item of cartoonishly over-indulgent cuisine and couture imaginable is being ferried about in the trailer, seemingly without any irony. A shortage of alternatives leave our friendly patrolman to suggest that this trailer might be cleared out and used as an impromptu bomb and fallout shelter. As finessed plans go it is fairly weak, but it is the best one he has and besides, he's the one with the gun.

On many levels, in fact, this plod is quite the dick. His unrelenting blend of buttoned-down officiousness, intransigence and total lack of a sense of humour would be a major bummer in any situation, but in this particular one it quickly starts to seem like overkill. Literally, in the case of the small pet poodle of one of our protagonists: its respiratory needs deemed surplus to the requirements of a post-apocalyptic community of lorry-dwellers, it is duly dispatched at the bare hands of this lurching wall of malevolent gristle. It is comfortably the film's most affecting moment; the dog was the only character for whose ultimate survival I had any vested interest. I also suspect the police officer was probably also a racist, although the makers of This Is Not A Test did not diversify sufficiently during the writing or casting process for this hypothesis to be verified. But he didn't like animals. Always a red flag.

Still, there is an upside to the patrolman's truculence and intolerable heavy-handedness. Once the remainder of our heroes discover the contents of the lorry's trailer, all subsequent attempts at clearance are done with a belly full of caviar, pissed up on 100 proof bourbon and wearing a mink coat. Whether or not this clever subversion of the gravity of the situation was a carefully-planned psychological trick on the part of the policeman is unlikely to ever become clear. It is only partially effective, if so... the undeniable thrill of skulling a bottle of hooch with a crown on proves as fleeting only as each participant's individual ability to suppress the weight of their knowledge re. the impending commencement of global thermonuclear war.

By the film's denouement, our heroes have divided into several distinct groups. The huddled lorry-dwellers quickly turn on each other as the temperature rises and claustrophobia takes hold. Taking their chances in the outside world are the hokey old grandpa, his granddaughter and the first available man she was able to grab from the roadblock. Pops chooses this moment, a mere 10 minutes before curtains, to remember that just round the corner - presumably just 11 minutes round the corner - there is an underground cave with a fresh water spring. Thanks, gramps. Ten minutes is still enough time to put you in a home.

Our outlaw, too, sees a window of opportunity - albeit a rapidly diminishing one - to make good his escape. Unfortunately, his attempt to steal a car quickly ends in a contretemps with an pickup truck loaded with chickens. The sight of a frantic scofflaw retributively laying waste to the hens who have scuppered him would be a striking addition to any film; in one dealing with portending destruction it borders on the tragicomic. Look on the bright side, Clint - if this is the worst thing that happens to you today...

As nuclear disaster films go, This Is Not A Test is not particularly outstanding example. The budget was low, characters laden with stereotype and its cast of unknowns fairly wooden. Nevertheless it is, at times, an interesting study in the breakdown of human society in the face of the unimaginable. Within 73 minutes, we witness mob rule, faction forming, dog murder, extra-marital affairs, crown theft and a near-immediate descent into mass alcoholism. These scenes prove in stark contrast to the official Civil Defense films that the United States was making contemporaneously, where government was well-drilled and impervious, the populace calm and victims few and far between. In their defence, the majority of these films were only twenty minutes in duration: it is always the subsequent 53 which prove the real yardstick.

Ultimately, however, the characters on display in This Is Not A Test all display such genuinely unlikeablilty (in what were, admittedly, chastening circumstances) that when the bomb's arrival heralds the end of the film, it is a relief on a number of levels. This Is Not A Test gets 3 out of 10 disaster points.

Disaster films, revisited

Long-suffering readers of my blog may well remember that in 2013 I attempted to watch the 100 top-rated disaster films on IMDb.com. The attempt, as predicted by all, was unsuccessful. Why should this have been?

Well, the reasons were varied. Firstly, I am flaky. Disgracefully so. The only defence I can present is that I am not being paid to write this any more than you are to read it. Maybe I should be. You definitely should be.

Secondly, watching disaster films is somewhat emotionally draining and dislocating. At best, that is. At worst it is fully traumatic, an invitation to an entirely self-inflicted pathology that could colour my remaining days. Fortunately, the intervening three years have rendered this less of an issue. I am now three years older and hopefully three years more emotionally mature. Additionally, society has since developed in such a way that chain-watching apocalyptic fiction is now no more chastening than watching the news.

Thirdly and most painfully for me to admit, my initial list and the model for its creation were shoddy. I am flabbergasted that past me would have allowed such a slipshod list into the public domain. There were countless exclusions and inclusions blatantly contrary to the qualifying criteria.

What has changed is that, over the past few weeks, I have found myself obsessively watching disaster movies once again, although this time through my own stupid free will rather than my own stupid self-discipline. I quickly realised that I had, quite unwittingly, managed to tick off a further seven of the films on my totally lousy and shameful original list.

The upshot of all this is that I am going to revive the project, but with some new rules which will hopefully see it able to thrive and - most important of all - a new list which may be amended and added to on the fly. What will any of us learn? Nothing. Which was my intention all along.

What qualifies a film for inclusion? Well, there are only reasonably mild changes from my original framework but I think they will be significant. My old first rule was "a disaster must happen in your disaster movie". A good start you'd think, but it in fact excluded a surprising number of titles. So my new rule number 1 is "A disaster must happen, be anticipated or narrowly be averted in your disaster movie".

Rule two remains unchanged. "A disaster must be the only reason for making your movie". Mundanity is the lifeblood of the disaster film. The everyday being disrupted is central. How else will your characters go about learning and growing, if not from beneath a fallen tree or stuck inside a volcano with an atomic bomb?

Rules 3 and 4 were more problematic. Inevitable and unavoidable disasters will now be included, so long as they fulfil the other existing criteria. Additionally, rule 4 will also now be disregarded. Some of the best films in the world require all of the characters being dead at the end of it. Many films that otherwise fall flat could be vastly improved by it. Food for thought for all you aspiring screenwriters out there.

Rule 5 (now Rule 3 thanks to my sharky streamlining) remains - "Your disaster must not be fanciful" - although in a reworded form and including this fancy diagram to give additional detail of exactly what I mean by it.

As promised, here is a helpful diagram

If you feel short-changed by this new truncated list, I may be able to placate you with an additional new Rule 4: "Your movie must be feature length, but films of any sub-genre are permissible as are made-for-TV movies". I love TV movies. Sequels and films dealing with the same historical disaster are now also allowed.

All of this meandering, tweaking and procrastination leads me to this: the reformed disaster film list. May god have mercy on all of our souls.

2012 (2009)
A Night To Remember (1958)
Airplane! (1980)
Airport (1970)
Airport 1975 (1974)
Airport '77 (1977)
Alive (1993)
Armageddon (1998)
Asteroid (1997)
Atomic Train (1998)
Atomic Twister (2002)
Avalanche (1978)
Blindness (2008)
By Dawn's Early Light (1990)
Contagion (2011)
Countdown To Looking Glass (1984)
Dante's Peak (1997)
Deep Impact (1998)
Dr. Strangelove (Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb) (1963)
Earthquake (1974)
Ebola Syndrome (1996)
Epidemic (1987)
Fail Safe (1964)
Fire! (1977)
Flight 90: Disaster On The Potomac (1984)
Flood (1976)
Flood (2007)
Heatwave (1974)
Hurricane (1979)
Krakatoa, East of Java (1968)
Meteor (1979)
Miracle Mile (1988)
Night of the Comet (1984)
Night of the Twisters (1996)
On The Beach (1959)
Outbreak (1995)
Panic In Year Zero! (1962)
Right At Your Door (2006)
Rollercoaster (1977)
Special Bulletin (1983)
The Big Bus (1976)
The Cassandra Crossing (1976)
The Concorde... Airport '79 (1979)
The Day After (1983)
The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
The Day The Earth Caught Fire (1961)
The Day The Sky Exploded (1958)
The Great Los Angeles Eathquake (1990)
The Hindenburg (1975)
The Last Voyage (1960)
The Night The World Exploded (1957)
The Perfect Storm (2000)
The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
The Swarm (1978)
The Towering Inferno (1974)
This Is Not A Test (1962)
Threads (1984)
Testament (1983)
Titanic (1998)
Tornado (1996)
Twister (1996)
United 93 (2006)
Variola Vera (1982)
Virus (1980)
Volcano (1997)
When The Wind Blows (1986)
When Time Ran Out (1980)
Where Have All The People Gone? (1974)
World Trade Center (2006)
Zero Hour! (1957)

Top 100 disaster movies: Titanic

Titanic (1997)

It's difficult to believe that Titanic is nearly 16 years old and therefore legally able to have sexual intercourse in the United Kingdom. Come the big day, I suspect that Titanic will most likely choose itself as its partner. It had that way about it, parping its own funnel. But then, films did that more back then. I think it would be hard to describe to someone too young to have been there exactly the kind of feverish hype that surrounded Titanic's release. Back then, we all thought it was real and screamed when things came towards the screen, of course. But I remember that I went to see it some time in the spring of 1998 in Brighton and the cinema was standing room only, something I have never experienced before or since. By the end of the seventeen hour long film, people who had sat right down at the front were walking out of the screening in the shape of swastikas, having done irreparable damage to their spines.

At the time I was obviously rather taken up with the hype of the whole film because I thought it was wonderful. I realise now of course that I had been played by the Hollywood system to a large degree. However, it would be wrong  - an understandable backlash against corporate propagandising of my malleable 18-year old brain - to claim that Titanic is not a film without quality. It's perhaps not our generation's Citizen Kane but then again, no ocean liners sink in Citizen Kane so its probably best to declare a score-draw on that front.

It's a hard film to watch again. This is not so much due to the poignancy of the story or the strength of the memories of my fallow youth, and more to do with the fact that it's really long. I would estimate that it must be at least six hours, although having just checked on Wikipedia I have discovered that the actual running time is 3 hours 14 minutes. And Leonardo Di Caprio is only dead for about fifteen of them.

Harsh again. My distaste for Leonardo Di Caprio is again forged by those times, in the heady days of the end of the last century, when he was being sold as our generation's Valentino. Di Caprio has gone on to be a very impressive, likable and versatile film actor, a lot of whose work I have enjoyed. And yet, upon seeing his name in the credits I still get the twitch. Titanic's psychological impact on me runs deep. As DEEP AS THE ATLANTIC OCEAN? Probably not.

Kate Winslet in Titanic: standing next to a peculiarly inaccurate mirror

My problem with Titanic is that, like many movies of the disaster genre, it is basically a tired old romantic potboiler, given a gravitas it perhaps hasn't earned by the inevitability of the lovers' demise. As if someone had made a porno based on John and Jackie Kennedy's last trip to Texas (which, incidentally, would probably be a better film). Titanic, of course, also dips deep into the old upstairs-downstairs class-based shenanigans so beloved by insane British people.

Treasure hunters (oceanographic explorers? well-equipped aquatic thieves?) find a safe in the ruins of the RMS Titanic. When it is opened, they find a jewel as big as your fist and a nudey charcoal sketch of a lady. It turns out that its subject is still alive, aged 208 and living in the United States. She is flown out to the explorer's ship where she tells the story of her trip on the doomed liner. It's a story of high-society, arranged marriages and ludicrous amounts of privilege. But nevertheless, they can all be shot through by shagging an Irish ragamuffin, on the boat as a third-class passenger having won his ticket in a dockside poker game and in the right place at the right time to prevent Little Miss Snooty from jumping to her death in a fit of wealthy pique.

And there you go. There's the trouble. The story of the fateful maiden voyage of RMS Titanic will be told for as long as there are humans to tell it. It is poignant enough, and tragic enough, without having to go all macro and examine just one or two sets of relationships. As far as the film goes, it tells the nuts and bolts story well: the special effects which were at the time completely groundbreaking in terms of their scope and their cost still hold up well and it remains very much the landmark for any future films of this kind. Quite whether the films that come after it need to so slavishly follow the generic tradition of doomed love is another matter, but of course they will and another part of us will die inside.

I think a better ending would have been that they discovered that Rose's amour from that night had not perished in the Atlantic as she had thought but was later saved by a passing boat. And yes, we've found him and brought him out to the ship. He's 206 years old but he can still get a hardon, it's Jack. A round of applause and a jokey reference to the fact he's off to ride her sideways would have made the wheelbarrow-load of Academy Awards seem so much more richly deserved.

I give Titanic SIX out of ten disaster points.

Top 100 Disaster Movies: By Dawn's Early Light

By Dawn's Early Light (1990)

If I were to make a nuclear war film, I would call it Zugzwang. This is because I am more intellectual than you. In the game of chess (oh yes, I'm going there), there will occasionally be times where one player cannot possibly do anything but harm their position but are nevertheless compelled to make a move. Having to make a move although it will be ultimately disadvantageous to you seems to me to be the defining quality of any nuclear conflict.

During the breakup of the Soviet Union, a rogue group of separatists have gotten hold of a nuclear missile and with some malice, launched it from a NATO base in Turkey towards the Ukrainian city of Donetsk. This sets all the Soviet-era nuclear response protocols - some of them completely automated, mind you - into action, meaning that there is an immediate and unstoppable retaliatory response on targets in the United States. The American President, who for some reason is Martin Landau, thought that the world was well and truly past all of this shit and is forced into taking countermeasures when an atomic bomb explodes in Washington.

During his subsequent flight out of the danger area, another bomb explodes too close to the helicopter, causing it to crash and blinding the President. With the commander-in-chief presumed dead, the American military assume control of the situation, cunningly finding the country's most old-fashioned and hawkish gun-totin', red-hatin' elected representative to assume political control and give full legitimacy to Rip Torn's view that the best thing to do now would be to bomb the entire USSR out of physical existence.

The President, found in a wood and taken to a rescue centre, must now desperately try and resume control of the situation by telephone alone, before everything is lost. Ultimately he manages to win over a hard-bitten military commander, played by James Earl Jones, whose airborn military control centre is flown into Air Force One before any really big buttons can be pressed.

James Earl Jones in By Dawn's Early Light: a definite candidate for any no fly lists.

I thought a lot about my wretched history of dismal defeats on the chessboard as I watched By Dawn's Early Light. It is a chilling reminder of the kind of counter-intuitive moves born out of nothing more than political and military expediency that have to be taken in extremis, as well as a critique of the dangers of intransigence. But mainly, I thought about how James Earl Jones was also on the B52 bomber that sneaks through Soviet defences to drop its payload in the film Doctor Strangelove. What with that, this and Darth Vader, it's a wonder that anyone allows the man to leave the ground at all, so bleak are the consequences of his being at altitude.

By Dawn's Early Light is an arresting watch and one which is still relevant over twenty years later. I give it SEVEN out of ten disaster points.

Top 100 disaster movies: The Cassandra Crossing

The Cassandra Crossing (1976)

Oh Jesus wept it's The Cassandra Crossing. I've seen some dreary crap in my time but this one almost took the biscuit. The titular crossing in question refers to a shonky, rusty and inadequately maintained railway bridge over a deep gorge in Poland. But no-one would never have had to go across it at all had it not been for some bewildered thieves trying to break in to the World Health Organisation building in Geneva. As is typical of such a mission, they both become exposed to a pretty scabby strain of weapons-grade pneumonic plague which the US military keeps there on the hush-hush.

When the surviving crimmo tries to make an escape on a trans-continental train to Copenhagen, the US military is forced to take control of the situation in order to keep a lid on the situation. And so armed men in Hazmat suits -  one part scientists, two parts terrorist heavies - board the train to ensure that it instead heads off to an old World War II hospital facility (or, more accurately, "hospital facility") in Poland. But with it becoming clear that the sickness is not as serious as was first feared, as well as local intelligence regarding the perilousness of the Cassandra Crossing bridge, the train passengers organise themselves into a guerilla troop to try and retake control of the train.

There are two disasters for the price of one in The Cassandra Crossing, the first being the potentially lethal escape of a bacteriological warfare agent and the second (predictable spoiler alert) a train crash. So there's really no excuse for how wretchedly boring this film is. Considering that this is film pregnant with potential tragedy, it takes the largely inexplicable decision to slow play every single element that could provide any grain of excitement or interest. Instead of pus, coughing fits and vertiginous plummets into the European scenery, we get the interminable development of a variety of strands of storyline that no-one in their right mind cares about. Will Burt Lancaster successfully manage to keep the nefarious deeds of the United States government from the general public (he almost invariably will)? Will esteemed doctor Richard Harris rekindle his romance with his twice-wife author Sophia Loren (no-one cares)? Can holocaust survivor Lee Strasberg face spending any more time at a secret facility in Poland (it's unlikely, let's be honest)? Will Ava Gardner get a shag (it's not looking good, Ava)? And will OJ Simpson successfully complete his undercover mission for the FBI and bring arms dealer Martin Sheen to book (nope)?

OJ Simpson in The Cassandra Crossing: not really a vicar, what else could this man possibly by lying about?

When the disasters finally do occur, they are all much more minor than they might have been with far too few of the desperately dreary dramatis personae perishing in them for my tastes. Which was a double kick in the teeth, if I'm being frank with you. There's so much potential here, you see - all of which that The Cassandra Crossing desperately fails to live up to with flying colours. Even looking past the all-star cast that is on display, there are two explosive and exciting key plot points that are underplayed to such a degree that the end result is barely a disaster movie at all - rather, it's more like a torpid romantic thriller which bores everybody to tears. As such, I can't recommend watching this film to anyone, on any level. It fails as a disaster movie, it fails as a thriller and it failed to engage with me as a drama. It's the longest 129 minutes you could ever wish to spend. Perhaps that's its intended audience - wrongly accused people spending their final day on death row.

I give The Cassandra Crossing a dismal THREE out of ten disaster points.

Top 100 disaster movies: Atomic Train

Atomic Train (1999)

If there's one thing that watching lots of disaster movies has taught me, it's that there's nothing like a nuclear explosion to bring a family together. Provided that none of the family's hair is on fire and their hand has grafted onto the side of a passing milk float in the heat. None of this happens in Atomic Train, however, and so the family unit comes out stronger than ever before, up until their teeth fall out or the sudden, unexpected nosebleeds. Previously want-away teenage daughters stop trying to frisbee their vagina at any passing male to own any form of vehicular conveyance, whilst their sprout-faced younger brothers get a new-found respect for their old man as well as a timely reminder of the things in life that are really important.

The marital bond, too, is strengthened immeasurably. At the beginning of the film, its key protagonist is estranged from his wife, who now prefers the attentions (i.e. cock) of a swarthy police officer. But there's nothing like a bit of trauma to make people re-evaluate their priorities. Plus there is now the undeniable bonus that the massive doses of radiation to which each has been exposed means its very likely that both parties will be rendered completely sterile, eliminating the danger of any unwanted progeny from the dirty, filthy, radioactive monkeysex that will almost certainly ensue.

Atomic Train is a parable for our times. It warns that in the post-Cold War age, there is as much danger from The Bomb falling foul of one of humanity's baser urges than there is any organised or concerted government military action. In this case, the all-too-human failing that brings about the crisis is GREED. It's one of the seven deadly sins, although when they were originally being written by wise Hebrew elders, it's unlikely that they would have envisioned of the chain of events essayed in Atomic Train.

A hazardous waste disposal company has somehow been given an ex-Soviet nuclear bomb to get rid of. Whilst there's no doubting that a nuclear bomb counts as hazardous, one has to seriously question whether or not its erstwhile owners has really found the right company to dispose of it. Maybe they were at the front of the Yellow Pages? Either way, the company agree to do it on the cheap and on the quiet. The amount of paperwork you need to complete to legally decommission a nuclear device is prohibitive, and this is why so many old Soviet nukes festoon council tips, in spite of the careful signposting to discourage it. And besides, what's the worst that could happen?

Atomic Train is a film that answers this question. The worst that could happen, in fact, is that the train transporting its cargo of toxic industrial waste (plus one sneaky ex-Soviet nuclear bomb, an old fridge, two rusty pram shells and a badly soiled mattress) could suffer brake failure and become an unstoppable projectile on collision course with a major urban conurbation, in this instance the city of Denver, Colorado. Efforts to stop the train prove continually in vain, despite the best efforts of National Transportation Safety Board officer Rob Lowe, who (almost literally) parachutes himself into the situation in that brave and admirable (i.e. foolhardy) way that no-one actually ever actually does unless they're on the clock.

Atomic Train: Rob Lowe's attempts to save the world and is relentlessly unsuccessful, it's just like real life

The decision is eventually taken to derail the train, whereupon the nuclear device is discovered in amongst a large cargo of unstable sodium. Once a well-meaning firefighting helicopter come by and waterbomb the area, it immediately becomes clear that the bomb disposal teams' wives are going to be claiming on their life insurance policies. The bomb explodes, leaving Denver in tatters but family groups everywhere reminded of the power of love, which conquers all. Or almost all. Tell it to the people who've had their head melted, or their dog buried under the rubble of their house. Greed actually conquered all. There's little positivity to be had.

A lot of reviews of Atomic Train choose to focus on its many, varied plot flaws and inconsistencies. I don't see any reason to do this. Taken at face value, there's already sufficient material to make the whole experience wretched and dreadful. The whole thing is so long drawn out that you start to wonder if there's ever going to be a disaster at all in this disaster movie. By the time there is one, it seems so rushed as to have been almost tacked on. And for all the emphasis on the familial storyline, there's little attention given to any greater, wider, emotional issues. Atomic Train is diverting, but only just. I may be old fashioned, but you shouldn't be actively seeking a nuclear explosion to happen in a film just to pep things up a bit. I give Atomic Train a feeble THREE out of ten disaster points.

How clenched was my anus?

I don't get many comments on my blog. This is my blog, that you are reading now. A very respectable number of people read it every day, mind you. Especially, you know, considering. But I don't get many comments. I can only assume this is because you all agree with me. Which is reasonable, I suppose.

But yesterday I got a comment which was a brilliant comment because it made me think. Me! Imagine that. It was with regard to my ongoing series of disaster film reviews which, as regular readers will know, are chipping away at my already parlous state of mental well-being. It was from Jessica and I think it bears quotation in full:

I know this isn't what you intended with this project, and it might not be lulz-y, but I want to hear more about the anxiety being ratcheted up by watching disaster movies.

You watch horror movies. I know this because I've watched at least one with you. Can you put your finger on why the disaster movies are freaking you out in a way horror doesn't? Is it just because the threat feels more 'real'? And if that's it, then do crime movies bother you? Because street violence is more of a real threat than zombies or nuclear holocaust.

I love horror but have very specific things that I won't watch, because they pull me out of a cathartic, pretend, safe terror and into a real-life terror. Disaster movies seem to be pulling you into a real-life terror. Just wondering if you've thought of why.

This is some pretty thought-provoking stuff. I'd not considered it at all. But it is true: horror films don't make me freak--the--hell--out at all. In fact, I'm wracking my brains trying to think of a horror film that does. I can only really point to one: An American Werewolf In London. But therein lies a story: in the early days of home video recorders, my grandparents got American Werewolf In London to watch and popped it on when I was in the room. I was probably four or five years old, and in a hazy childhood evening fug of doze. But sufficient amounts of it obviously seeped in to do some really very significant damage to the wiring of my brain. To this day, when I see this film it does me very serious damage. The only thing that comes close, and for similar reasons, is The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town from The Two Ronnies.

So there we go. Nearly thirty-three years and only two traumatic horror film experiences. And in both cases, there are extenuating circumstances: one from deep-seated childhood psychological trauma caused by dimwit grandparents (it would have been their 59th wedding anniversary today, incidentally), the other caused by being a complete bloody idiot.

What's going on, then? I've had to wrack my (brilliant, brilliant) brain to try and figure it out. Because it's not just monsters and zombies and aliens that populate the horror canon: the most devastating horror films of all are the ones that deal with real life situations. Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, for example, are both easily within the realms of possibility. Indeed, they are both based on the same real-life case. Here the enemy is the dark parts of the human psyche, and the extent to which they reside within us or within the people that we meet every day. That is surely a more terrifying thought than asteroid strikes or nuclear wars - which tend to be, by their very nature, once-in-a-lifetime (although no-times-in-a-lifetime remains my preferred frequency) events?

And yet, the pursing of my ringpiece says otherwise. I'd drop everything right now to watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre again. But I'd need to be dragged, Ludovico Technique-style, to watch Threads. (On a related tangent, I also find A Clockwork Orange a far more disturbing film to watch than any horror movie.) So, what gives?

Me, watching When The Wind Blows, yesterday

My explanation is as follows: horror films are about death. Our innate, primal, fear of death. But disaster movies are not. They are about life, or rather, survival. And dying is easy. It is living that is hard. Which is to say, hard enough as it is. It's why I have tried (and failed, incidentally) to eliminate any film where literally everybody on Earth dies at the end from my list of disaster movies. There's a resolution to them. They're not the ones that stay with you.

The films that have, to be perfectly blunt, really fucked me up so far have been Threads, Special Bulletin, and When The Wind Blows, as well as The Day After, which I have watched but not yet reviewed. These films are terrifying because people survive. But they live on in such stark, reduced circumstances. And we leave them at such an early part in their new story. That's when it weedles its way inside your imagination. That's when you start to try and imagine how you'd cope and what you would do. There's the killer. A film that gets inside your mind will be the one that chips away at your sense of self and burrow under your onion layers. It's why you can happily watch Die Hard and then go to work the next day in a high-rise building, but if you instead watch Targets you'll only dare to poke your head outside your hidey hole if you've put a saucepan on it.

When The Wind Blows was the worst. Along with Special Bulletin it had novelty on its side, as I'd not seen either before. But there was more to it than that. It seemed so local to me (it was), so relevant and realistic. It threw me into a day of depression. I was really very affected and upset by the whole thing, much more so than an 80-minute film should have any right to make me. But it's not the those eighty minutes that are the problem. It's the hours and days after. I've not yet found a horror film that continues to scare me, make me think or make me jump, after it has played out. And there's the difference.

Top 100 disaster movies: The Day The Sky Exploded & The Night The World Exploded

The Day The Sky Exploded (1958)
The Night The World Exploded (1957)

There's nothing that 1950s science-fiction films did better than moralising. Today's two disaster movies both teach us about the evils of technological progress and conclude that if we carry on the way we are, we're all doomed.

The Day The Sky Exploded is an Italian film, dubbed into English. Unless you watch it in Italian, of course. It is a parable concerning the birth of the space age, Sputnik having gone up into orbit the year before. The film deals with the first manned mission to space, as American pilot John McLaren (for the dubbed version, his voice is provided by Shane "Scott Tracy from Thunderbird 1" Rimmer, a bonus) sits atop his giant atomic rocket to see what's what up there. However, when he loses control of the rocket in orbit, he ejects (which is only sensible, let's face it) and his pod returns to earth. However, faulty radio communications mean he doesn't hear the messages from base as to what to do with the atomic-powered boosters, which plough on into the beyond and cause an explosion with a giant asteroid belt, sending all its very best rocks in Earth's direction. Only some carefully targeted nuclear missiles can save us now. That's right, the same technology that caused all of humanity's problems is now its only salvation. This is irony for the atomic age.

The Day The Sky Exploded: This is why we should be more bloody careful

It's fairly standard stuff for the time. Nuclear weapons are bad (they are), the dawning atomic age is strange, frightening and dangerous (it was) and sending loads of shit into space is a great unknown (it still is). If 1950s science-fiction films have ultimately achieved anything, it's to make any number of serious points and objections seem like trite cliches. So, thanks for that, the 1950s. I can't recommend The Day The Sky Exploded with any real gusto as a result. The best actor in it was a dog, who was presumably an Italian dog. I give The Day The Sky Exploded a dreary THREE out of 10 disaster points.

It wasn't just in the day that things exploded in the 1950s, though, nor was it confined to the sky. In 1957 the whole bally world exploded, at night. There was barely a time of the day left that humanity was safe. The Night The World Exploded sees a dedicated seismologist called Dr. Conway build the most sophisticated device for predicting earthquakes ever seen and immediately it predicts that there's about to be a significant seismic event. There is, thus proving that his device must be well skill. But it doesn't stop there: there is an outbreak of savage earthquakes, all across the world. The earth's axis shifts as a result, meaning that cups and saucers all slide off tables. Scientists from around the globe descend on America, which is of course the best country, and during their experimental prodding around Carlsbad Caverns they discover an element previously unknown to science.

The Night The World Exploded: point it out the window and see if you can squeeze out a few drops, love

This element has a number of alarming properties, the chief amongst these being that, upon exposure to nitrogen, it expands and then explodes with enormous force. Scientists quickly realise that this Element 112 festoons the Earth in quantities which make you suspicious of why no-one has ever discovered it before. Volcanic activity is forcing it up towards the surface all over the world, causing it to dry out and then react with the nitrogen in the air. This is to blame for all the earthquake activity. Bleak news, especially after a supercomputer calculates that the final, cataclysmic quake that will destroy the planet is due in just 28 days. The scientists have just four weeks to cover Element 112 with water, stop the reactions and save the Earth. This they just manage to do, although not until Dr. Conway hatches the bright scheme to use Element 112's explosive force to blow a dam. That's right, the thing causing the problem proves to be our only salvation.

Presumably now safe, with government pamphlets distributed worldwide telling householders to just piss on any 112 that crops up, Dr. Conway is free to get balls deep in his glamorous assistant, Laura Hutchinson. No doubt to the chagrin of her fiancé. But what was to blame for this frightening state of affairs? I'll tell you: mining and oil drilling. Extraction of fossil fuels had raped Mother Earth into producing this violent counter-reaction. Quite how jetting hundreds of geologists around the globe to discuss this further will ultimately prove of any constructive use is one for the sequel.

The Night The World Exploded is another predictable, preachy 1950s sci-fi by the books. I give it FOUR out of ten disaster points.