26 Films: World Gone Wild

World Gone Wild is a 1988 post-apocalypse which is based on the model of the classic Western The Magnificent Seven. It's got a pretty simple plot, a village in the desert is being pillaged by a roving cult which takes the young men. The village needs to hire protectors and well you can pretty much guess the rest. 


I saw this film in the theater when it was released and have owned my VHS copy for a number of years. It's not a great film, but it's watchable and entertaining in it's own way. Stars Bruce Dern and Michael Pare carry the film with enough grit to keep it real, and of course Catherine Mary Stewart is always a welcome addition to any 80s film. As far as I know this is not on DVD and it's likely to be (but it would be a great double disc with Neon City) any time soon.


So this is the last of the films I am covering for 2011. I am not planning to keep the same every other week film write up, but I will have some movie coverage in the coming year.

FFB: ILL Wind By

    The two pillars of the post apocalypse fiction world are Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank and Earth Abides by George R Stewart and every other book in the genre owes some debt to one or the other. Alas, Babylon deals with the aftermath of a nuclear exchange, and Earth Abides deals with the aftermath of a plague which wipes out a chunk of humanity.

Illwinds falls mostly into the Earth Abides camp, telling the story of what happens when microbes intended to eat oil spills end up eating all petroleum based products on the planets. Airplanes fall from the sky, the combustion engine is useless and the infrastructure of the world just seems to fall apart.

I don’t recall much from the book aside from the plot other than I enjoyed it, as I enjoyed most of the books in the genre that I read at the time. There were a few that I read and didn’t really get or like. With some of these books that I recall liking and some that I recall fondly I wonder if they would hold up for me. I was a different kind of reader then, I was living a life that had different expectations and a different perspective on life. I have to admit that I have some fear of opening one of these books and finding that I have changed too much, or worse yet finding that I haven’t.

Anyway, Ill Winds was once worth reading for me, and if you are looking for something to follow up The Stand or Swan Song, it might just fit the bill.

Kick ass and explore.

Go Go Girls of the Apocalypse by Victor Gischler

I grew up with the promise that the world was going to end in my life time, that some one was going to drop the bomb…. And it scared me, and then it thrilled me, but mostly it got me to watch a whole bunch of bad after the bomb flicks, and read a shelf full of Post Apocalypse book… ok not all of them were bad, but by the time I was 25 I had my fill…. And the USSR was done and pretty much we seemed to be out of the woods.. It’s safe to say that for the last ten or so years I didn’t need to read any more of these kinds of book… but I was glad that I picked up Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse.. it’s a fun fast paced little satirical adventure. The story follow Mortimer Tate and unlikely survivor of the end of civilization as we know it, who comes out of hiding after 9 years to find the world changes, and because he was holed up waiting and had a stash of stuff…. He’s a relatively rich man. He stumbles through a whole set of adventures, many of which pay homage to the best of the Post Apocalypse stories of the past…. Including in theme. Of all of those works this one most closely draws on the theme of David Brin’s The Postman (yes the book that the bad Kevin Costner flick was based on)… in that Mortimer and his crew on some level realize that society really need to have lines of connection and supply to continue…. And that there is something to be said about local people and small operators taking care of what needs to be done… anyway, I enjoyed the book a lot, as it was witty, funny and never got bogged down. I especially liked the one and a half pages that tell the story of how Jack Daniels stayed in business after the end…