There have been a surprising amount of post-apocalyptic films made here in the UK, although the style tends to be very different to that of the Mad Max 2, barbarian-style copy-cat films made in the US, Italy and the Philippines. Landmark early titles like Things to Come (1936) helped establish the genre when film itself was still a new medium, but there were few early PA films from the UK.

The British film industry has taken itself very seriously when it comes to PA films. Whilst the Americans were making drive-in Atom age PA movies, we were making depressingly real life dramas like The War Game (1965).  Even The Bed Sitting Room (1969), an out-and-out comedy, had a darkly depressing streak running through it.

Later, in the 70's, the genre was starting to look tired, despite the fact that the Cold War raged on. The TV show Survivors (1975-77) again highlighted the horrors that would befall the country in the event of a nuclear war. In the US, the late 70's saw a spate of "city gang" films that hinted at a new angle for the genre. When Mad Max 2arrived in 1981 there was an explosion in the genre, mixing an easy-to-film wasteland setting with barbaric gangs and a worthy hero figure to rescue the hopeless. Surprisingly, Britain was one of the few countries to not capitalise at the time, possibly because we lacked an abundance of desert scenery (although we have an  abundance of rock quarries), or maybe because that "action-hero thing" was just something we have never been able to do well. In 1984, Threads continued the British tradition of shocking, depressing post-nuke films that highlighted the immediate aftermath of a nuclear strike rather than looking into the future.

1990's Hardware looked, from the outside, to be a typical PA film, but the story had a unusual style and lots to think about. It seems  nobody would commission a PA in the UK if it didn't give you something to think about. A commendable ideal, but not much fun for this particular website that revels in the crapness of the Mad Max 2 rip-offs.

Now in the 00's we are seeing a real revival in the PA-style films. Gone are the nukes, replaced by natural disasters, zombie hordes and even female infertility. Some of the best films in the genre from the past few years have come from the UK (Children of Men, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Zombie Diaries, Flood) although the onus is still on the immediate after-effects of the disaster, and they very rarely delve far into the future.

So what does the actual future hold for the genre in the UK? Well, Doomsday is shaping up nicely for a 2008 release and there are a number of medium to large-budget book adaptations that may or may not be filmed here. Additionally, the chance of a 28 Months(or Years) Later movie is quite high.

Below is my personal collection of PA VHS and DVD scans. The films are in year-of-release order and seperated into A, B and C catagories. Some of the DVDs are European-wide releases or even worldwide but most are UK releases.

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Survivors Volume 1 (1975)
BBC VHS from 1993.

The New Barbarians (1982)
pre-cert EV (Entertainment in Video) VHS, big-box.
Our Review

Battletruck AKA Warlords of the 21st Century (1982)
1989 Cannon VHS release.
Our Review