The Aftermath (1982)

Trailer: 

*Spoilers Throughout*

What’s This About: Astronauts return to Earth unaware that in their absence WWIII happened and the Earth is a post-nuke wonderland with mutants and Forrest J. Ackerman.

Here are some of my observations as I watched the film:

• Why is the music sound like it’s a Hammer Horror production from 1974?
• It is a period of civil war….wait, sorry.
• Top notch special effects! This space craft’s control board looks like Milton Bradley made it.
• OK, everything these astronauts are saying is sexual innuendo. “How long before reentry?” “It’s not going to be long now Newman.”
• Instead of returning to Earth from a long space journey and finding out humans have been replaced by highly evolved apes, these jokers are returning to a completely destroyed Earth. Which is basically what I see every morning.
• This cheap flick shows one matte painting of a destroyed city block and the rest of the examples are destroyed farm houses, which if you drive enough in this fine country you always see dilapidated barns all the time.
• Random humans running around the fields. Nice nipples from this one chick.
• I think some humans are hunting the other humans. Hard to tell since no one is speaking or stopping to explain shit.
• Christ! This musical score sucks ass.
• A hunter that looks like Howard Stern just lasso’d a fella from a moving pick-up truck.
• Sid Mother Fucking Haig!
• And he has those rapey eyes scanning the hunted humans his minions brought back for him and eyeballs the nipple lady specifically.
• Sid tells his minion that looks like Rambo Jim Croce to put the women in thee truck and the men: “the usual”. Shit, I hope that means killing them.

• Not just killing them, but massacring them! One fella got a shotgun blast to the back of the head exploding it into smithereens!
• The space shuttle is named The Nautilus. Very original.
• HEY! That’s the Millennium Falcon’s targeting computer!
• The shuttle is tearing apart on reentry!
• You may want to buckle up there cowboy, it’s going to be a bumpy landing!
• The lone surviving astronaut (of a crew of three), Newman lands on the same beach that Charlton Heston realizes he was on Earth the whole time in Planet of the Apes but instead of the ruins of Lady Liberty, he finds decomposed fishermen, sun bathers as well as some cease and desist letters.
• I just realized that Newman is played by the writer/producer/narrator/director Steve Barkett. So you know this vanity project is going to be the tits.
• He’s basically a poor man’s Richard Dreyfuss.
• Did I say decomposed earlier? I meant papier-mâché.
• Oh wait! Another member of Newman’s crew also survived. At least Newman has a lover buddy now.
• Mutants! Humanoid mutants try to attack Newman and the other guy while they slept at their campsite.
• I should’ve questioned why the dead beachgoers had a machete with them on the beach but I suppose the California coastline is more treacherous than I imagined.
• Oh no. Los Angeles is all in ruins. Anyway…
• Newman narrates that he and Mathews said very little as they descended the mountain. There’s been only like 25 lines of dialogue so far in this flick.
• How long has Newman and his crew been in space where they missed a whole World War III? Unless WWIII was like a few weeks of nothing but nuclear missiles flying to every corner of the globe.

• More narration about what they’re doing as we’re watching them do it. Also you have 2 men not saying a word to each other while we hear voice over from Newman. It’s odd because everything Newman is narrating he could be conversing with Mathews but instead we’re stuck listening to boring VO narration.
• Maybe Newman secretly hates Mathews and doesn’t want to speak to him anyway.
• Newman went into the abandoned radio tower not only alone but without his machete. It’s a bold move, let’s see if it works out for him.
• He finds a dead man with his hand still on the tape recorder, so he moves his hand and rewinds the tape a few seconds and listens. It’s a Professor Raymond Knowby and he states: “Recite the passages… dispel the evil… save my soul… and your own minds!” Just pulling your chain, it’s more exposition about the nuclear war that destroyed the planet.
• There’s a itty-bitty scene where Newman tells Mathews that he found a geiger counter at the radio station. Mathews questions if it works and Newman says it works but there’s nothing registering at the moment. And that was all.
• However, and I’m probably just nitpicking here but if the whole planet has been annihilated so badly by nuclear war, wouldn’t there be radiation like everywhere and in high measures? Isn’t Chernobyl still emitting dangerous levels of radiation since 1986?!
• First he finds a machete, then a geiger counter. Perhaps a helmet that renders him invisible he will also need for him to complete his quest?
• He also at some point found a shotgun. That should be helpful.
• So instead of searching for life or anything resembling civilization, Newman and Mathews clean and fix up a house to live in. Super chill these dudes.
• Newman and Mathews have a heart to heart regarding the apocalypse. Seems Newman always wished for the end of the world as we know it mostly because he lost his wife and kid years ago. So, he’s taking the good (no taxes, government or “ugly apartment buildings”) with the bad (killer mutants out for human blood).
• Let’s see how glad he is about the fall of humankind when he has to locate some mustache cream!
• Big storm’s a-coming! Huge radiation storm that is! Still wishing the world ended now, Newman?!
• Obvious comparison and metaphor by having Newman take shelter in a natural history museum with dinosaur bones and aztec artifacts.
• This is going to be long, long movie…
• Especially when we have to sit thru Newman’s flashbacks/dreams of him and his wife and kid. Silent montages mind you.
• He’s staring at the pterodactyl fossils and I’m hoping, wishing, praying that the creature comes alive and attacks him.

• Great. A kid. Just what this flick needs.
• Hey! Forrest J. Ackerman in his 136th cameo in a mediocre genre flick.
• The moral of the story kids is this: “…it was the smallest things that did us in, tiny little invisible particles we couldn’t even see by the naked eye…Destroyed by atoms and germs. What irony.”
• For some odd reason, it’s been taking Sid Haig a long time to finally torment and rape the nipple lady. I wonder what kept him so busy all this time?
• How’d he find a beer? The beer is in a green bottle, probably a Heineken, so of course it was left behind in an armageddon.
• He can’t rape her until he finishes his beverage.
• OK, he’s ready now.
• Why is he trying to kiss her?
• While he’s in the throes of his own deprived ecstasy, the girl grabs a broken piece of a glass bottle and stabs him and escapes. Sid Haig is not a very god rapist it seems.
• Ackerman shows Newman his hand which is has either a rash or is bruised and says that since Newman is an astronaut, he doesn’t have to explain what’s wrong with his hand. Why would an astronaut know medical shit like that?
• Apparently within minutes of showing his hand, Ackerman says goodbye to Chris, the little boy he’s been taking care of, because he’s feeling ill and is going to sleep…the big sleep.
• Now Newman is in charge of Chris. I guess Mathews is all on his own now.
• Look Chris, when Newman said that they should find things to salvage for the house, he didn’t mean a rusted or incinerated kitchen pan, which incidentally was the first thing you saw. Newman humors him so he doesn’t have to hear Chris’ moaning and wailing.
• I don’t know if the soundtrack was off there but Newman reacted to a gunshot like he’d been hit but seems to be fine. But he fell before the gunshot sound effect went off! His Spidey-senses worked!
• Chris kinda looks like Lupus from The Bad News Bears. Same awkward gawking face anyway.
• Ah, Newman was shot but the pan that Chris gave him saved his life!! Bet you feel stupid now Newman.
• The sniper in the house is so dumb he didn’t think that Newman would go in the house when Newman ran towards it.
• HAHAHAAHAHA. Newman fails to sneak up on the sniper because he stepped on a bullet which tripped him as he was about to shoot the sniper. Fucking klutz!
• The sniper’s a chick! The Nipple Lady! Wait, how did she get a rifle and ammo?!

• While Newman and Sarah get acquainted, Chris gets attacked by mutants. Which one of them kinda look like Bughuul from the Sinister flicks from far away.
• This score just does not fit this scene of them being attacked by mutants. It feels like it should be in a late 70s Disney flick. And it just won’t stop!
• I don’t know how or why Sarah got this Jeep unless she stole it from Cutter (Sid Haig).
• After one mutant brawl, Sarah and Newman have already fallen in love with each other. Not that they have a lot of normal people to choose from but still that’s lightning fast chemistry!
• Bewbs! Did not expect that to be honest.
• Hey. Nice pajama pants there Newman.
• Newman is telling Chris (while Sarah eavesdrops) all about his deceased wife and child. And you would think a guy who is relieved that the world has been destroyed would really stay away from starting a new family again.
• More nudity from another random survivor from Cutter’s crew.
• Mathews is still in the picture after all. There was no scenes of him meeting Chris or Sarah. Newman narrates his own bowel movements yet he couldn’t mention Mathews and Sarah meeting or anything?
• Out of nowhere the good guys are planning on attacking Cutter’s camp.
• There’s a sign on a door that says: Explosives. Keep Out! Well what if someone needs a stick of TNT?
• While Cutter is gently raping a lady, Newman interrupts Cutter at gunpoint. But he refers Cutter by name, not sure when he learned his name when he never even seen him before. Lucky guess I suppose.
• I’m sorry, but you can’t just have Sarah shoot a fucking laser gun without first introducing said technology prior. Here I thought this flick was grounded in some sort of reality of its time and out of the fucking blue there’s laser guns! Did I miss something somewhere?

• OK. To be fair, I went back to the attack planning scene and Newman is working on the laser gun (which just looks like any machine gun) and he mentions “…when the laser starts firing…” I must’ve been taking a note at that time. My apologies. Still crazy that an astronaut is building his own laser gun through. I guess NASA really was the shit back in the early 80s. Not just freeze-dried ice cream and pens that write upside down.
• Sarah! No! Don’t shoot the explosives shed! It says Keep Out!
• They had Cutter all tied up and somehow he sill managed to get away. I’m not sure why they were keeping him alive. Were they going to give him a fair trial first? Or was Sarah going to rape him to give him a taste of his own medicine.
• Someone broke into the good guy’s house, knocked out Mathews and scared the new lady and her daughter. When Newman comes back with Chris, he discovers all the girls including Sarah was killed. Not sure why they left Mathews alive.
• They literally just rescued the mother and daughter last scene. If it wasn’t for Newman’s boring voice over I wouldn’t even know their names.
• It’s kinda funny that whenever Newman finds new survivors, they were already found first by Cutter.
• Newman just takes the three corpses into the living room and then just torches the whole house.
• Wait. So when Cutter escaped before he didn’t go into hiding or establish a new camp, but just went back to his original camp. So lazy.
• NEWMAAAAAN!
• Again, how does Cutter know Newman’s name?
• I dunno, but maybe attacking the villains’ camp in a Jeep with no doors or roof wasn’t the best idea when the villains all have guns.
• The Jeep was no match for that wall of stacked empty cardboard boxes on fire.
• I’m willing to bet that writer/producer/director/star Steve Barkett, didn’t direct this decent shoot out scene and its action because the rest of the flick has been as exciting as watching CSPAN with the sound off.
• I’m assuming this the start of the finale and I can’t think of any other movie where the hero and the main villain never really talk or establish an adversarial rapport. This movie just lazily draws lines and moves the chess pieces.
• Also, Newman is a decent marksman, bomb maker, laser gun genius, stunt driver, as well holding his own in hand-to-hand combat for an astronaut. And you should try his creme brûlée!
• This flick also has very little to do with the post-nuke world and how to navigate and survive it. This is just a western movie at this point.
• Mathews to the rescue! Any minute now he’ll be killed.
• And there it is! In less than 10 seconds!
• Again with that same matte painting that they showed 3 times now. Must’ve been expensive.

• All this time the movie showed dilapidated buildings and shacks in the wilderness. Now they are in the city and there’s a large office or government building that looks untouched and undamaged.
• The Jim Croce looking minion is on the roof of this building and Newman is scaling it to get to him. I know it sounds riveting but I’m just counting down the seconds until this is over.
• I haven’t the foggiest notion where Cutter is. But I’m banking on him making a surprise attack once Croce’s dead or if Newman gains the upper hand.
• C’mon falling dummy! Let’s see it!
• Maybe later, but Newman did have the upper hand but then he recalled the three dead girls that he knew for a week or so and Croce managed to knock the shotgun out of Newman’s hand.
• Newman takes Croce’s bowie knife and slowly stabs him in the guts while saying the names of every other good guy that they killed. Then stabs him right in the eye.
• So after a whole Newman reuniting with Chris and them having this nice philosophical chat about death and trying to find new shelter. BLAM! Newman is blasted in the chest by Cutter’s shotgun! Did not see that coming actually.
• He’s still alive though, the movie doesn’t have that much balls. Plus, it’s the writer/producer/director/lead actor.
• “You should’ve killed me when you had the chance.” Says Cutter. Yeah, that’s what I said.
• Hahahaha. Newman attempts to throw a knife at Cutter but he’s too injured and weak so it basically flops on the ground nowhere near Cutter.
• Dayum. Cutter then just shoots Newman again point blank. But Newman’s still alive?! Writer/producer/director immunity!
• Chris of course is the hero and shoots Cutter dead.
• I don’t really know how much time has passed since Newman arrived back on Earth and met Chris but in his dying breaths he tells Chris not to cry and that they had some good times together. Yup, good times in Armageddon for sure.
• Newman has to know that Chris is not lasting more than a week on his own in this shithole situation they’re in.
• Now Chris is narrating!
• I totally missed the fact that Dick Miller provided a voice in this.

 

What year?!: Unknown—probably the year the flick was made, which according to imdb trivia was 1978.

Who are the Enemies: Rogue band of psychotic ne’er-do-wells and some mutants

What Happened to the Earth?: Nuclear Holocaust

Final Thoughts: This one tried to take itself too seriously and fell hard on its face. Writer/Director/Producer/Lead Actor, Steve Barkett is no Clint Eastwood however, I do give him some c credit for not making a complete and utter turd. I actually believe he tried his best with the limitations of the time and the lack of real studio money. I’ve definitely seen a ton worse and more boring flicks. I’m not saying you should give this a try though either. 

PS: I had mentioned how unimpressed I was with the musical score but when I read this trivia nugget on imdb, I’m now questioning my sanity: Steve Barkett met with James Horner to do the score but hired John W. Morgan when young Horner couldn’t provide any samples of his work. According to Barkett, Nicholas Meyer was so impressed with the score for The Aftermath that he wanted to hire Morgan for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), but in this case the studio chose Horner.

Score: 4 (Forrest J. Ackermans) (out of 10)