My Rating:
6

Seen It:
Yes
(September 2008 )

If you ever speculated as to what a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s nuclear-powered dark comedy “Dr. Strangelove” might look like, all you need to do is dig up a copy of this barbed, uncompromising and absolutely hilarious post-apocalyptic satire from Lester, who pretty much squandered all of the clout that he had built up throughout the Sixties as the director of such ground-breaking hits “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Help” and “Petulia” in one shot when it quickly came and went from theaters. (Of course, the box-office potential wasn’t exactly helped by a promotional campaign that actually referred to it as “a bomb” and indicated that it was far too intelligent for most viewers to handle.) Based on a play co-written by British comedy legend Spike Milligan (and God only knows how it was presented on stage), the film is essentially a loosely-linked series of sketches showing the 20-odd English survivors of the shortest war in history (2 minutes and 28 minutes) as they attempt to continue on with their lives amidst the rubble of London–the BBC is reduced to one man who presents the news on an individual basis, a nurse (Marty Feldman) presents a still-living woman with her death certificate, a young woman (Rita Tushingham) lives on the still-running subway with her parents while preparing to give birth to the child she has been carrying for 17 months, a old man (Ralph Richardson) slowly transforms into, yes, a bed-sitting room and a pair of officious officials (Dudley Moore and Peter Cook) roam the countryside ordering anyone they come across to keep moving along. Although there are moments of poignant drama and genuine horror (the sight of London reduced to piles of now-useless consumer items in unexpectedly eerie), this is essentially a wild comedy in the tradition of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” (which premiered a few months after the film was released) and those with a taste for Pythonesque humor will no doubt spark to its offbeat charms. Although it occasionally pops up on cable and in revival screenings, this film has mysteriously never been available on home video for reasons that currently escape me.