Testament
Director: Lynne Littman
Year Released: 1983
Rating: 2.0
Takes the most inherently awful scenario in the world - the death of millions of people by nuclear attack - and then adds another gimmick to it: treating such an unbelievably horrific story ... with relative calm (I'd like to believe the R.E.M. song, "It's the End of the World As We Know It" is a slap in the film's face). Jane Alexander buries her temperamental youngest son in a hole, sews up the sheets around the corpse of her daughter, tries to kill herself, her oldest son and a retarded boy in a car ... and as a reminder of things past, there's flickering archival footage of her family, once happy and playing in the yard, now gone. Unlike Threads, the 1984 film by Mick Jackson, it tries to curtail specific details, treating its horror with numbness - the film never explodes into complete sorrow so the audience can.
