Weekend Double Feature: New Year’s Fears

Welcome to the Fancast Weekend Double Feature! Free movies, free fun, and you’ve got the best seat in the house - your house. Sit back, relax and take in some classic movies.

New Year’s Eve is fast approaching, and as we bid farewell to 2008 - a year of dizzying highs and terrifying lows - we reflect, as always, that maybe THIS year will bring about the end of all things. Sure, Y2K didn’t bring it about, but there’s the whole pseudo-panic about the Mayan Calendar ending in 2012, and the vague ballpark figure of 2000 years until an apocalypse hinted at in various holy texts, and one really starts to think about just how the kind of widespread societal destruction that has given us the settings for some of our most badass movies might actually come about. So we present two films that give us their visions of the End of Days. Panic in the Year Zero gives us an eerie 1950s vision of a nuclear holocaust, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea shows us death from above, lighting the very sky on fire.

But first, check out some Coming Attractions!

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Panic In The Year Zero

Yes, the economy is in the toilet and everyone is panicking about a Greater Depression, but back in 1962, there was a different kind of constant national nightmare - nuclear war, and if you had a choice between waiting in breadlines and having your atoms disintegrated instantaneously and scattered to the winds, there’s only one option.

Ray Milland directed and starred in Panic in the Year Zero, a somber story about a Los Angeles family going on a quiet fishing vacation, but on their way, they suddenly see a mushroom cloud forming over their hometown. Their plan is to hole up in their vacation spot and await news, but their journey is fraught with rioters, looters, heavily-armed survivalists and marauding drugged-up bikers. The Baldwin family does all they can to remain levelheaded in the face of disaster, but there’s only so long one can survive in a world without hope.

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Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

A disaster movie about global warming… made in 1961?

Sure, in this case, it’s about meteors setting the Earth’s atmosphere itself on fire, but Al Gore would probably recommend you watch Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea right alongside An Inconvenient Truth just to illustrate how far science has come. It’s the story of the state-of-the-art submarine called the Seaview and its crew, led by Admiral Nelson (Walter Pidgeon), as they strive to implement their risky solution for the burning sky problem. The U.N. wants to just wait it out, but Admiral Nelson knows that with the precise application of nuclear missiles, they can blow the fire out of existence before it cooks the Earth. You can bet Still-President Bush wishes he could just fire a nuke at global warming to finish it off.

Directed by Irwin Allen of The Poseidon Adventure fame, the film also stars Joan Fontaine as the stress-observing scientist Dr. Susan Hiller, Barbara Eden as Lt. Cathy Connors, Frankie Avalon as Lt. Danny Romano, Michael Ansara as religious fanatic Alvarez, and the great Peter Lorre as Commodore Lucius Emery.

MORE MOVIES:

See what’s on tap this weekend nationwide and in carefully selected theaters.

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