TheDenizen's TV Movie of the Century

Howdy, ninja gang...I'm back from my vision quest in the desert.

I've been caught in the swirling undertow of the time sink that is Read Dead Redemption for the last several weeks (too soon to declare GOTY?), but I've finally finished that up and gotten back into the swing of watching the crappiest movies I can find. I've got a backlog of shit to watch that would stagger a proctologist, so I soldier on.

One of the unexpected joys of mining the depths of lesser known world cinema is the occasional unearthing of an absolute gem. I recently watched the 1984 British made-for-TV nuclear holocaust film Threads, and not only was it the best film I've seen in ages, it gets my nod as the best TV movie I've ever encountered. I thought it would be a bit of a laugh, but I was dead wrong.

There are a couple of types of post-holocaust film: the predominant Mad Max action type, with outlaws and raiders racing around the wasteland and blowing each other up over resources, and the rarer scaremongering type which try to frighten people with dramatizations of how horrible the aftermath of nuclear war would truly be. Probably the best known American example of the latter is "The Day After", another TV movie from the same Cold War era as Threads. However, The Day After was full of melodrama and Hollywood heroics, and painted a cheesily unrealistic picture. The blunt realism of Threads is shocking in comparison.

Threads focuses on two working class families in Sheffield, England, which is the country's fourth largest city and one of the main centers of industry. The film slowly builds up the characters of Ruth and Jimmy, a young couple expecting a child, as well as their parents and siblings. In the beginning, there are news reports of tensions in the Middle East that everyone ignores. But as Jimmy and Ruth find an apartment and begin building their lives together, the tensions suddenly escalate into a very real threat of war between America and the USSR.

As panic gradually builds, people begin hoarding food and building bomb shelters according to government issued instructions. Contingency plans are put into motion, but suddenly 200 megatons falls on England and fucks up everything. Millions are killed in the initial blasts, and the survivors quickly discover that their shelters are woefully inadequate. Weakened by radiation sickness, hunger and disease, many millions more don't survive the first weeks. The film then continues on to tell the story of some of the few people remaining in England over the course of the next 13 years, struggling to cope with the reality of a world where everything left is irradiated.

The brilliance of Threads is twofold. One, it is disturbingly realistic looking. The filmmakers employed the expert knowledge of many scientists and nuclear theorists in writing the script, and filmed in a documentary style. The direction is flat, there is a monotone voiceover filling in necessary details, and almost no music to speak of. It feels real. Two, it doesn't flinch away from the horrific truth of the effects of nuclear explosions and fallout at all. Burning corpses, dead children, desperate and violent looters, radiation burns and projectile vomiting, completely ineffective government measures, mutations, it's all here. The only thing that Threads shies away from is cannibalism, which is never mentioned...although we do see survivors reduced to eating rats and raw animal carcasses.

Even without the cannibalism, Threads is relentlessly bleak and joyless, grisly horror piled upon horror, and the ending ruthlessly snatches away the one tiny shred of hope that exists. Threads aired on British TV in an era when most people only had 4 TV channels...millions of people saw this and it must've scared the bejesus out of Thatcher's England. It scared the bejesus out of me. And I loved it.

I do enjoy a good downer movie, and Threads is the granddaddy downer. It forces you to recognize the futility of trying to think or plan what you would do in the same situation. There's nothing you could do and there's nothing the survivors can do except keep going. Everyone should see this, especially horror buffs...it really is frightening. Powerful and affecting, seek Threads out and watch it.

Until next time...