Review – This Is Not a Test

This movie seems like it would be upsetting, as the upshot is that it’s stupid to try to survive a nuclear attack. Being stranded together on a desert highway during a red alert seems to bring out the worst in people, and their personal weaknesses combined with their desperate situation virtually guarantee their demise. On the plus side, if this is what humanity is really like then atomic annihilation would be a real blessing. Particularly offensive is the power-mad cop who decides a woman’s small dog is breathing too much air in their makeshift bomb shelter, so he strangles it to death. This low-budget mess from the 1950s plays like something Rod Serling might have written if some terrible tragedy had left him with the intelligence of a dim-witted five-year-old child. It escaped “avoid at all costs” only by the narrowest of margins. Wish I’d skipped it