Apocalypse Movies

End of the World Cinema

By Kim Newman

2000

First Published

3.57

Average Rating

272

Number of Pages

8H18M

Audio Length

"Vivid, intelligently critical, perhaps best book ever written on the subject. Film history is all about choices. Newman's concise, no-bones prose keeps you humming through the book, all the way from the post-WWII 'bomber command' cycle of American war films through the 'asteroid-threatens-the- earth' cycle of the late 1990s (even an aside to last year's 'Arlington Road.') Special two chapters devoted to the now classic fifties cyles 'Monsters & Mutants,' and 'Norms vs. Mutates.' The common thread, from post-1945 on, is The Bomb, and as Newman's sublime thesis suggests, ALL MOVIES post WWII have had to acknowledge the reality of the nuclear genie in some way. Most insightful 'Learning to Love the Bomb,' focusing on sci-fi films during mid-sixties, early-seventies detente' and 'There ain't no Sedalia!' examines the last major burst of made-for-TV nuclear war movies in the mid-(Reagan)eighties. Newman's critical eye, sharp prose turns this into a landmark book of film scholarship. Film buy it, read it, read it again."

Avg Rating

3.57

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

20%

4 STARS

33%

3 STARS

31%

2 STARS

16%

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Kim Newman

Author · 47 books

Note: This author also writes under the pseudonym of Jack Yeovil. An expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include Nightmare Movies and Millennium Movies), Kim Newman's novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. He is complexly and irreverently referential; the Dracula sequence—Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula,Cha Cha Cha—not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany's air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith. In horror novels such as Bad Dreams and Jago, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche—perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel Drachenfels which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel. Life's Lottery, his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero's fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality.