The Day the Earth Caught Fire

1961 end-of-the-world movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Thanks to stupid Communists and their stupid atom bomb tests, the earth has a screwed-up axis and is now hurtling toward the sun. This makes everything really hot and really orange and gets Al Gore excited enough to assault a few more women than he normally would. Some newspaper men work to unravel the truth about the chances of earth's inhabitants as the changes wreak havoc on the climate and weather.

One of the characters in this has such a great line, something like how in four months we'll have the delightful smell of charcoaled mankind. I'm paraphrasing, but whatever the exact line was, it sure made me hungry. This talky sci-fi disaster flick works extremely well despite that talkiness because it's so well written. There's a darker humor beneath the surface of this otherwise serious story, and the science behind it all never seems all that far fetched. I loved the start of the movie--everything soaked in this ominous orange with an ominously lurking camera. Apparently the heat of the sun can not only turn everything orange but melt telephones. It's not something I've ever thought about, but I guess it makes perfect sense. I like how the story was pushed along in tidbits, the audience finding out what's going on as the men in the newspaper office begin to uncover the mystery. I think it helped put the audience inside that mystery, and it was a relief to have the problems uncovered by intelligent and witty English folk rather than a studly action hero type and a damsel-in-distress you normally get with sci-fi B-movies. The main character was studly enough. Actually, he was really sort of a sleazeball, but he was a charming enough sleazeball. This isn't heavy on the special effects and won't dazzle modern audiences like The Day after Tomorrow or other movies that use computer graphics to destroy national monuments, but there's a lot of stock footage (I think) and stuff that looks like stock footage that works really well to show the abnormal weather and the terror that it causes. This smart science fiction tale was directed and co-written by Val Guest who directed another interesting sci-fi/horror thing called The Creeping Unknown that I need to see again some time.

This was recommended by Cory.