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Blu-ray Film Review | Radiance
Panic in Year Zero! (1962) • Limited Edition Blu-ray [Radiance] — post-apocalyptic misery from before it was fashionable
In 1960s California, a family fights for survival after a nuclear attack.
Difficult as it might be to believe today, there was a time when our screens weren’t full of post-apocalyptic stories. From big-name TV shows and movies like The Walking Dead (2010–2022) or I Am Legend (2007), to smaller and often better ones like The End We Start From (2023) or Leave the World Behind (2023), to verging-on-arthouse fare like Time of the Wolf (2003), the iconography of collapse–looted supermarkets, abandoned cars, overgrown buildings–has become almost wearisomely familiar. But the genre only really became widespread in the 1970s, and perhaps only escalated to the level of mass obsession in the current century.
Still, the actual end of the world came as close as it ever has to reality in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and so it’s appropriate that one of the first films that can be described as fully-fledged post-apocalyptic, Ray…