What grim movie is Day the World Ended. In that classic canard the movie starts at the "End" and finishes at the "Beginning", but in between we get a glimpse of how some sorts of people might face the end of modern society after the bombs drop. It's not a happy look.
A man and his daughter await her boyfriend as the bombs shellac the world outside an isolated valley which seems to have a gap in which radiation can only enter slowly. The boyfriend does not appear (we think) and instead we get a hood and his stripper girlfriend, an old prospector and his jackass, and a heroic engineer. All of them share the dwindling abundance as they wait to see what will emerge from the atomic fog above the lip of the canyon. One other gets in their midst, a man already irradiated enough to die but who hasn't and instead is changing. He goes up top quite a bit and reports that a new civilization is taking form, a savage world of kill or be killed and riding on top of this new world is a singularly deadly creature. Of course that creature (designed and played by Paul Blaisdell) ends up finding his way into the valley.
There's death, betrayal, faith, and sacrifice as the story unwinds. Sadly though it's all too easy to forget the devastation as the survivors have it pretty comfortably, at least for the time being. Then mutants from above find their way in and danger abounds. Somehow they find a silver lining in this dark tale, but seeing is believing.
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