Good movie but grossly overrated

disgusting, overrated, pointless

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Has the writing and production values of a TV show. A bad TV show. And is Milland supposed to be the good guy? Barely an hour ater hearing about the nuclear blast he's buying guns and holding up the hardware store owner. Frankly I saw the whole thing as some kind of right-wing survivalist nutjob's wet dream. Oh, and those hipster rapists? Were they supposed to be scary?

. . . just as foretold by this flick that MGM (aka, "the Voice of America's Fat Cats") distributed decades ago. "Harry Baldwin" is a prototypical U.S. Fat Cat when he begins his murderous crime spree (featuring most of the other major felonies) during PANIC IN THE YEAR ZERO! As Harry progresses from armed robbery to assault and battery, continuing with blockade running, he teaches his two teen kids that MGM people should behave as if they're rulers of an Empire of One. Other folks exist only to be robbed if they have stuff you want, or murdered if they're in your way. Harry drives this point home by torching a busy interstate highway evacuation route, burning countless families to death in their cars, simply because the chicken Harry wishes to cross the road. Harry seems to have a thing about roadside mayhem, as he's soon instructing his son about bridge demolition. It's not long until Harry graduates to gunning down youths one by one, rather than simply burning anonymous families alive in their vehicles. The Trouble With Harry is that he seems to have no future. Harry tends to be in a constant state of PANIC IN THE YEAR ZERO! However, Harry's spiritual brother ran for U.S. President in 2016, and WON! Now we're all being entertained by seeing the whole USA being run as if it were an Empire for One!

Ray Milland directs and stars in this gritty, cold war tale of a family trying to survive in the mountains after a nuclear war. Milland emphasises an 'everyone for themselves' survival ethic as his character struggles to keep his family alive at the expense of anyone who stands in his way. The movie was a low-budget project, so don't expect to see vistas of destroyed cities (you see one distant mushroom cloud) or any massive military presence (you see one jeep), but despite the cost-cutting "Panic in the Year Zero" is an effective early entry into the post-apocalyptic genre. Although mostly bloodless (a person shot at close range with a shotgun just hugs himself and topples falls over), the film is quite adult, with several cold-blood killings (on and off screen) and rapes (all off screen). The jazz music score, which is dated and excessive at times, detracts from the bleak tone of the movie, and the ending, while likely 'realistic', may not be a good match for some modern viewers' worldviews. Worth watching, even if only as only a celluloid relic of the cold-war.

Whatever drew Ray Milland to direct and star in this piece of junk? Was it the chance to direct? Had his career hit a low point?The real blame goes to the writer. The script is terrifically plodding and predictable, clunking from one incident to the next with no finesse whatsoever. The dialogue--my god, the dialogue!--is completely cringeworthy. Most of the time it's just functional, but on the rare occasion when it tries to rise to something higher, it becomes ridiculously awkward. Dad tells Mom, "I was looking for the worst in others and found it in myself." Whoa, so pseudo-profound.Niney percent of screen time is given to Milland. Ninety-eight percent of the dialogue is given to him. Frankie Avalon and some young actress play Milland's teenage children--she probably has no more than six lines of dialogue. Apart from lots of "OK" and "Sure" Avalon may have eight or ten lines.Many scenes are shot on sets that are about as convincing as an episode of the Twilight Zone or an early episode of Star Trek. You can hear the voices echoing on the sound stage. The bushes and rocks are only rough approximations of the real things. The lighting is pure studio lighting, without even a pretense of being outdoors.Finally, the music is awful. I know it was the fashion around that time to use a kind of very intrusive jazzy score--like in In the Heat of the Night. But it puts up a wall between you and the action, its blatant artificiality a constant reminder of how false and patched-up the whole production is.For a summer drive-in movie, it might be worth the 25 cents, if it came with a second feature and some good cartoons. But why reviewers here have such good things to say about it, amazes me. It's the worst movie I've seen in a little while.