The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
A catastrophe refers to a vast and cataclysmic event that disrupts society. This can be everything from Nuclear War to Alien Invasion, from Plague and Pandemic to Monster Movies and the zombie apocalypse to list some of the most common examples.
A catastrophe is anything that wrenches life out of the everyday and affects society on a wide scale. Society can refer to everything from the entire world, a whole country to a city or a small town. Catastrophes can range from widespread mass destruction to environmental ones to those on a small scale where people unexpectedly lose their senses or memory.
The Catastrophe film is often related to the Disaster Movie, which is a more melodramatic form featuring clearcut characters and their dramas as they are caught in the midst of a catastrophic event, although it should be made clear that not all catastrophe films are disaster movies.
Disaster movie in which Los Angeles is devastated by an earthquake Size 7 on the Richter scale. Despite a script by Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, this is the usual soap opera melodramatics
A thinking person’s disaster movie depicting Japan’s sinking into the ocean
George Romero’s most underrated film, filled with disturbing images as the population of a town are driven crazy by a bio-weapon spill The first and also the best of a number films on the theme of outbreaks of mass insanity
The film that created the modern zombie genre, that took a creature from voodoo and reinvented at a something stumbling and wanting only to devour flesh. George Romero creates a horror film that shoots out all cozy, established convention
An End of the World film in which an atomic bomb causes a crack in the Earth’s crust. From the era before the disaster movie, this has yet to discover the idea of creating pieces of self-contained spectacle but works in its own sprawling way
Terence Fisher was a cornerstone figures at Hammer Films. Less well-regarded is his 1960s trilogy of science-fiction films. This is an alien invasion film that is a model of economy, told with a stark effective tension
The film that inspired the popular tv series. As always with Irwin Allen, stolid dramatics, bad science and colourful spectacle
Classic British end of the world movie that presents with enormous conviction a fundamentally implausible scenario in which nuclear tests tilt the Earth off its axis causing a massive heatwave and the attempts to right it
Classic George Pal produced effects spectacular where Earth faces destruction in the face of collision with an oncoming planet and the efforts to build an ark so that some might survive
The world’s first disaster movie concerning a worldwide flood. This has some extremely impressive effects for the era showing New York being drowned. Less interesting are the dramatics in the ruins