Panic in Year Zero!
1962 film by Ray Milland
Panic in Year Zero! is a 1962 American black-and-white survival science fiction film from American International Pictures. It was produced by Arnold Houghland and Lou Rusoff, directed by Ray Milland, who also stars with Jean Hagen, Frankie Avalon, Mary Mitchel, and Joan Freeman. The original music score was composed by Les Baxter. The screenplay was written by John Morton and Jay Simms. The film was released by AIP in 1962 as a double feature with Tales of Terror.
Plot
Harry Baldwin, his wife Ann, their son Rick, and daughter Karen leave suburban Los Angeles at sunrise to go on a fishing trip to the southern Sierra Nevada wilderness, bringing with them a small camping trailer. After a couple of hours on the road, Harry and Ann are startled by a series of unusually bright lights in the sky, accompanied by a radio station going to static. Tuning through stations, they hear a sporadic news report broadcast on CONELRAD that hint at the start of an atomic war, confirmed when the Baldwins see a large mushroom cloud from a hydrogen bomb rising over Los Angeles, now many miles away. The family attempt to return home and rescue Ann's mother, but Harry soon realizes that the roads will be clogged by panicked people, and what is left of the city will be saturated in atomic fallout.
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This entry incorporates text from “Panic in Year Zero!” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.