In 2012 -- a definite Bad Movie We Love -- the Earth is being superheated by "mutant neutrinos" supposedly linked to a planetary alignment predicted by the Mayans. First, Gaia explodes in a fiery rain of molten B-movie cheese, and then a magnetic pole switcheroo causes a tectonic boogaloo that unleashes tsunamis big enough to inundate the Himalayas. It's the very best in schlock science and mysticism from Roland Emmerich, whose last picture, 10,000 B.C., had it that the mammoths built the pyramids. But while 2012 shamelessly appropriates sequences and tropes from just about every major disaster movie of the past, oh, forever, there are still a few crapocalypses too silly for even Emmerich to pilfer. Or maybe... just maybe... he's saving them for 2013?
10. Robot Monster (1953)
The world has been destroyed by Ro-Man, a man in a gorilla suit wearing a diving helmet. Guided by his interplanetary boss, the, um, Great Guidance, with who Ro-Man communicates via a bubble maker and reel-to-reel tape recorder, he has killed off all but eight of the world's population with his Calcinator Death Ray. But while he's a fighter, he's also a lover and a thinker, who must balance his genocidal urges with his developing lust for the loveliest surviving Hu-man babe. Thus his Rumsfeld-esque musing: "I cannot yet I must. How do you calculate that? At one point on the graph do must and cannot meet? Yet I must but I cannot!"
9. Ultra Warrior (1990)
When Roger Corman gets his Oscar next year, here's hoping the clip reel includes bits of Ultra Warrior. Actually, it'll have to, given that this post-apocalyptic epic is comprised largely of footage recycled from the B-movie king's other better-known New World flicks, like Battle Beyond The Stars and Lords Of The Deep. Seriously, even the sex scenes are culled from other movies' carnal sequences! The "story" stitching all these shreds together has Dack Rambo as Kenner, the prophesied Great White Wolf, who has come to liberate the mutants from the evil overlord The Bishop. Set, tellingly, on April 1, 2058, the wasteland here was caused when the space defense system was accidentally trigged, vaporising millions and irradiating everyone else. Because the production also utilizes outer-space footage and mechanical murderers, it's explained that what's left of Earth is under threat from a) aliens from a parallel universe who want to turn the planet into a star and b) robots called Enforcers who started out as peacemakers but turned evil.
8. Knowing (2009)
In Alex Proyas's surprisingly successful piece of end-is-nigh nonsense, it is, in 2012-style, a solar flare that's gonna take us out, as predicted by a schoolkid, a source nearly as unimpeachable as misinterpreted Mayan calendar hoodoo. It's as decent a premise for an apocalypse movie as any, except that Proyas also includes a) black-clad alien child-watchers called "The Strangers" who look like escapees from Kraftwerk and b) a bunny-populated heavenly refuge seemingly designed by the same people who do those naïf born-again Christian picture books. What starts out as a spooky story becomes laughably po-faced as Nic Cage embraces a New Age in a finale that once seen is still unable to be believed.
7. Gas-s-s (1971)
Roger Corman's hippie-era take on end-times has it that a gas-s-s leak kills everyone older than 25. Can you dig, baby? Pitched as a satire, this cheapie posits that all the members of the Love Generation, upon inheriting the Earth, immediately repeat the sins of their fathers and mothers and resume pig politics as usual. Save our heroes, of course, who set out for New Mexico and the ultimate commune freedom, man. The scenario, while far-fetched, will be immediately familiar to anyone who's stepped into a mall multiplex after 7pm. There just has to be a remake of this: Imagine a briefly "totes perf" society in which nothing interrupts Tweeting and hooking up and Tweeting about hooking up... until the tripartite government headed by the Jonas Brothers dissolves into bloody internecine warfare.
6. It's Great To Be Alive (1933)
A remake of the 1924 silent film The Last Man On Earth, this musical sci-fi comedy has the world's men wiped out by the plague "masculitis" that even an Albert Einstein impersonator is unable to cure. The only dude survivor is a young aviator who avoids succumbing because he conveniently crash lands on a Pacific Island. When he's returned to civilization, he finds he's to be auctioned off to the highest lady bidder by a Chicago gangsteress! Unfortunately, clips from this one are scarcer than recognizable human emotions in 2012, so instead, please enjoy a montage honoring the late It's Great To Be Alive star Gloria Stuart, who'd return to the disaster genre in 1997's Titanic.
5. End Of The World (1977)
Long after his Hammer heyday and a couple of decades before Lord Of The Rings and Star Wars returned him to the spotlight, Christopher Lee played a priest who's actually on alien on Earth to orchestrate the apocalypse because meddling humans are threatening to pollute the universe. Complete with stock footage earthquakes, ETs returning home via teleportation and a planetary explosion climax, this is When Worlds Collide meets End Of Days. Happily, if you've a spare 90 minutes or so, you can watch the whole thing now, free and legal. Good luck with that!
4. Yosei Gorasu (aka Gorath) 1962
Having had first-hand experience with real-life Armageddon-type experiences, Japanese filmmakers spent a lot of time in the 1950s and '60s reinterpreting America's atomic experiments via giant dino-lizards, massive moths and Neptune Men. But Gorath -- aka Yosei Gorasu -- takes the yellowcake by piling every disaster scenario Roland Emmerich would ever toy with into one movie. So alien cells become a giant monster just as a burning planet races towards Earth. To counter the threat, brainiacs shift the Earth's orbit, which only makes the beast stronger, while also producing tsunamis and fiery conditions.
3. The Bed Sitting Room (1969)
There's much to fear after the apocalypse -- giant cockroaches, marauding punks, road cannibals and the prospect that, with the still-appealing-to-ladies John Cusack among the first-generation survivors, future men would all look a little like Lloyd Dobler. But The Bed Sitting Room proposes an even more frightening proposition, that those who survive the three-minute WWIII will mutate into wardrobes, household spaces and even parrots. This Richard Lester-directed Brit entry was dreamed up by John Antrobus and Spike Milligan and boasts a strong pedigree of survivors in a cast that includes Milligan, Ralph Richardson, Harry Secombe, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook.
2. The Core (2003)
While based on a novel called Core by respected sci-fi author Paul Preuss, you can just bet the studio pitch meeting was lava-boiled down to: "Armageddon -- in reverse!" Solar disturbance - rapidly becoming the early 21st's century dark-horseman, at least in movies - has caused the Earth's core to stop rotating. Aaron Eckhart, Hillary Swank between Oscars, Bruce Greenwood, DJ Squalls and Stanley Tucci are the drill sergeants trying to kick-start the thing with a whopping atomic blast before... we're all fried by electro-magnetic radiation! They'll achieve this stirring impossibility in a ship built from pressure-resistant Unobtanium. The Core has more cliches in its trailer than you'd think possible and the movie couldn't sustain the cheese. And in terms of science, this has been repeatedly voted the worst-ever movie misrepresentation of a number of disciplines, not least screenwriting.
1. Birdemic: Shock And Terror (2008)
Not to be confused with Birdemic: Romance And Cigarettes. Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds is pretty much an apocalypse movie, and would have gone all the way if the final scene of the Golden Gate Bridge teeming with squawkers had been shot. Thank God, then, for consumer video cameras and Commodore 64-compatible freeware effects. A flock of eagles and vultures descend on a small town, apparently dropping 100-lb. bombs as they do so -- explosives that don't actually cause much reaction from drivers in background cars. Director James Nguyen has said in interview that he sees this mostly as a romantic thriller. Can't actually see that, but on a plasma screen it might keep your cat entertained for an hour and a half. Patience is required when watching a trailer that demonstrates some Malick-esque scene setting before eventually rewarding when the avian apocalypse beak-gins.
Michael Adams is the author of the upcoming comic memoir Showgirls, Teen Wolves, And Astro Zombies: A Film Critic's Year-Long Quest To Find And Watch The Worst Movie Ever Made (HarperCollins)