The Russians are coming!

...in all of the movies I'm watching this week, that is!

After about 4:00, I arrived home from work, and plonked down on the couch for some good old fashioned Cold War hysteria. It's a collection of DVDs called Cold War Hysteria, and it should be on everyone's Christmas list. Not because anything on it is of particular artistic interest, even though freedom-pissing John Wayne and fellow traveler Edward R. Murrow appear together in a short film called, I believe, "The Challenge of Ideas," explaining the global communist menace. Most of these, I suspect, are available at archives.org, which you should certainly know about (well, at least the Prelinger archive!). 3 DVDs of the most delightful propaganda.

I think that I may have found a worse movie than...almost anything. It's a feature film called, This Is Not A Test. If you follow the link, there is a link to the whole movie. Be warned, however. The plot is simply none of our business, and I am convinced that everyone deserves to die in the movie.

There are lots of instructional films about how to prepare and live in a fallout shelter, army films about atomic weapons testing with cool slow motion explosions, and a really, really awful one by the paint stripping and lacquer industry about how keeping your house neat and clean and, above all, painted with good American paint, will protect your home from fire in the case of an atomic attack. I mean, fucking really.

There are a lot of little morality plays. The doctor who sets up a triage unit and who has access to a phone line, but decides to not call other shelters to check on his wife because the phone lines will be needed. The precocious young scamp, who I hope sucks an radioactive lemon, who dutifully stays in his basement until the block warden comes around. Oh, and except for one case, kids' parents never die in atomic attacks. Everyone is always ok in another shelter. I love the rosy side of nuclear Armageddon!

So if you are looking for a good time in the public domain, I've given you a couple of titles!

HJ