I’m a sucker for “end of the world/civilization” stories so here’s the start of a list of films in this category off the top of my head. Please add to it! Qualifying titles would have the common premise and setting of the world as we know that is collapsed, overrun, destroyed, wiped out, etc. by biological war, famine, meteor, disease, zombies, monkeys, aliens, etc. with isolated survivors desperately hanging on for the ride.
28 Days Later
The Stand
The Quiet Earth
The Omega Man
The Last Man on Earth
Road Warrior + Sequels
12 Monkeys (a small portion, unfortunately)
Planet of the Apes 2 and beyond (because now we know it’s Earth)
Romero’s “Dead” series
Reign of Fire
ooh, there was one when I was a kid…hmm, “Desolation” maybe…I remember it had lots of cockroaches and this big tank-like vehicle the survivors drove around in. Crap, I’ll go do a search.
I always liked the original Mad Max better than The Road Warrior+sequels. The version not dubed over. The post apocalyptic world in Mad Max felt much more interesting and real then the sequels.
I remember one being shown every Saturday. Some kind of goo is leaking out of the ground and it make rats, spiders and maggots 5 stories tall. Then it floods and the world ends.
Of course this was 20 years ago, who knows how accurate that is.
Logan’s Run (?)
Night of the Comet…hehe
Time Machine
and there was a rash of TV movies in the mid-80’s about life after a nuclear winter. I remember one produced by the BBC that was very gritty, can’t recall the name though…
Is that “Food of the Gods”? It wasn’t grandly apocolyptical, but it did have giant critters feasting on hapless humans. We might not be thinking of the same movie, though.
I love this genre as well, although I wouldn’t put stuff like Dr. Strangelove, or would-be disaster films that don’t actually end the world (Armagedden, Meteor, Deep Impact), or pretty much any 1950s movie in it (like Earth vs. the Flying Saucers/War of the Worlds, Day the Earth Stood Still), or updates like Independence Day, because to me the genre isn’t about Earth potentially being destroyed – hell, you could add all the Godzilla movies in, if that was the definition – it’s primarily about the life after a disaster that has mucked up the world, or about losing the fight to save the world.
With that in mind, here’s a list that I compiled:
Day of the Triffids,
Last Night;
Night of the Comet;
The Day After;
Miracle Mile;
When worlds collide;
Threads;
Damnation Alley;
Testament;
On the Beach;
Until the End of the World;
World War III (with David Soul)
Here’s your list, just to keep a compiled one, although I struck Planet of the Apes since I don’t think it’s the same type as the others:
28 Days Later
The Stand
The Quiet Earth
The Omega Man
The Last Man on Earth
Road Warrior + Sequels
12 Monkeys
Romero’s “Dead” series
Reign of Fire
I a huge fan of the genre, so I can’t imagine there’s anything major I missed (other than probably some nuclear war stuff from the 80s).
Day of the Triffids was one of the good old British sci fi flicks. There was another British end-of-the-world one from that era whose title I can’t remember. It was about the Earth’s orbit having been altered toward the sun, and it had some of that decent British no-budget stuff in it, like all the cars being equipped with special cooling tanks on their roofs.
Thought about it - the 50’s version doesn’t count, any more than all the other “earth vs. aliens” movies, because the snatchers lose. In the 78 version, I guess it potentially ends with the end of the world.