Book/Movie reviews:

[Grand58742]

If you happen to read a book and enjoyed same (or think it needed some work) by all means, post a review up here. I know James Wesley, Rawles has another book coming out (today I believe) and it's worthy of a review. This forum isn't designed specifically for just writers so if you want to post up a review of something preparedness you read, by all means, post up a review and where you found it.

I know we have some avid readers on here and others could benefit from some firsthand knowledge of the members here instead of some book critic sitting in the New York Times office thinking the story sucked.

Just let us know title, author and where we can find it if you believe it's worthy of our attention and enjoyment.

ETA: As Lowdown3 just mentioned, feel free to add in movies of the genre as well. I can think of a few off the top of my head you shouldn't waste your money on. Defcon 4 comes immediately to mind unless you have an hour and a half of your life you won't miss and you are having trouble sleeping.

But then again, there are others out there that are pretty good that we could benefit from by either the knowledge or the entertainment.

[Lowdown3]

Great idea. Ditto with movies of the genre as well.

I've often thought about writing "reviews" of some of the post apoc hard to find movies I've collected over the years. But I wasn't sure if anyone was interested or could even find the darn things any more.

If folks are interested I'll try to write about one here and there. Odd ball and hard to find stuff. Ever heard of : "Massive Retailiation", "Warlords of the 21st Century" "Letters from a Dead man"???

[EX121]

So I just finished to end of the world books that I enjoyed.

The first by David Webber is "Out of the Dark" a good alien invasion scenario, with some believable prepper characters. It is a very good story, but I didn't like the ending. And it looks like there may be a sequel.

The other is a very good book that my wife also read and enjoyed. It is by Daniel H Wilson, "Robopocalypse". This book is being made into a move which will be directed by Stephen Spielberg.

I'm currently reading a very funny but disturbing book called "2030"by Albert Brooks, its basic premis is that the US is drowing in debt, because all of the "olds" are living too long and the "youngs" can't pay the national & personal debt for the olds. I'm just getting started so thats all I can say for now.

[Grand58742]

I'm currently reading a very funny but disturbing book called "2030"by Albert Brooks, its basic premis is that the US is drowing in debt, because all of the "olds" are living too long and the "youngs" can't pay the national & personal debt for the olds. I'm just getting started so thats all I can say for now.

Funny, this sounds strangely familiar...only difference is the "olds" in our case have typically worked for everything they've earned.

But in 20 years? And the upcoming generations that "gimme, gimme, gimme" who knows. I'd like to know how that one pans out

[stonewater]

lucifers hammer by larry niven, it got me started in all this stuff :)

[Urban Survivalist]

About 3 months ago I wrote a review on One Second After on the General Forum . Great book would recommend it to all.

[EX121]

So I finished 2030. It started out good but I was disappointed with it overall.

[Grand58742]

So I finished 2030. It started out good but I was disappointed with it overall.

Starts off exciting but once you get to reading into it, you find it's horribly put together and really short on substance?

Sounds like my ex girlfriend lol

[Grand58742]

Movie Review – DEFCON 4

Okay, so I was bored one night and downloaded this movie, remembering it from my youth as one of those movies I wasn’t able to watch as a child, but seeing the movie posters for it in the old video store (the ones with both Beta and VHS for rent lol) and had kind of a cool looking poster ad for it. Yeah, so I waited a few years and finally found it for download off a website. And I was thinking “cool, something I’ve waited almost twenty-five years to watch!” Cool 1980s-esque intro and got to the first scenes.

And there my excitement ended…

Plot: Three astronauts are onboard a nuclear armed space station in “the day after tomorrow” (although the movie is set in 1984ish) and witness a nuclear exchange on the planet. Okay, nifty plot, however, the three folks on the station are probably the last members of society I’d ever put there.

Anyway, they end up getting deorbited (by a computer hacking high school student…very Wargames-ish) along with one of the nuclear bombs the station had onboard (this is really important later). Land on a beach somewhere in the eastern United States. Now it’s been 30 days after the big exchange and the area is already overrunning with “Terminals” who are already cannibals a little over a month after a nuclear exchange and have been able to form alliances with each other. To include one dude (who isn’t a cannibal I don’t think) who comes up with some seriously Mad Max vehicle he rolls around in. (Never fully understood where he got the fuel to run the thing, but I guess that’s not important)

Yeah, a little odd you might say and not quite what I was thinking.

Anyway, main character, who BTW is different than your typical 80s action stars (he’s pretty much a wuss) meets some dude with a cool BOL (at least the booby traps are cool) and has a hostage in his basement. Escapes only to get caught by the local “militia” for lack of a better term which is run by a high school student. Now how in the world a bunch of grown adults and military folks (supposedly there was a military base nearby) would allow a rich high school kid to run a group?

I was saying something about unbelievable wasn’t I?

Anyway, long story short. Girl on space station (I mentioned there was a woman, right? No, can’t have an 80s action flick without a hot woman) gets captured and eventually killed. Main character gets captured. Dude with the BOL gets captured. Hostage from the basement gets captured and was the girlfriend of the militia leader. Maybe not in that order, but it happened.

SPOILER ALERT

So they are charged with trespassing or something (mock court so it doesn’t really matter what the charges are, it’s a movie). Characters end up getting rescued more or less by the timely intervention of the paralyzed victim tired of the militia boss’s actions. They fight back, big gun battle, cool Mad Max vehicle goes rolling, main character escapes, gets on a boat to go to his family, battle on a boat where militia leader gets wounded and thrown off (and miraculously makes it all the way back to his camp) and dude starts sailing south.

And the icing on the cake? The other nuclear bomb on the station finally goes off, killing the evil high school militia leader. Never knew if the main character ever got to his family as the movie (thankfully) ended and I got to reclaim the wasted space on my hard drive.

Overall thoughts…

Sub B movie that took the worst parts of Mad Max, Wargames, Red Dawn and just about every PAW movie you can remember of that era, combined it into a low budget film with some pretty horrid acting and unbelievable scenarios.

Not a great deal to be learned from the film except:

There will be roving bands of cannibals 30 days after a MAD nuclear exchange

Private school jackets will become the rage in the PAW

Don’t bother looking for tanks in the PAW since the anti-social hermits with a thing for kidnapping high school teenage girls will create one in 30 days

Apparently society will gather itself up after 30 days and create shanty towns complete with structures and everything (like a North American version of “Barter Town” without the pigs, Tina Turner and Thunderdome)

High school students will run the militias

An Army Fort will be run by an Air Force E-2 in the PAW

NASA and the USAF standards for astronauts went way down before the making of this movie

Apparently Caterpillar tractors converted to tanks can go for days without running out of gas

So no, probably not a great deal to be learned from the movie.

It’s your typical B Rate PAW movie that failed from about the first ten minutes…maybe five… okay, in reality the first thirty seconds. No real plot, no cool BAMF characters of the 1980s we were used to seeing, horrid acting and low budget special effects.

Makes for an hour and twenty minutes of your life you’ll never get back.

[Lowdown3]

Sub B movie that took the worst parts of Mad Max, Wargames, Red Dawn and just about every PAW movie you can remember of that era, combined it into a low budget film with some pretty horrid acting and unbelievable scenarios.

Not a great deal to be learned from the film except:

There will be roving bands of cannibals 30 days after a MAD nuclear exchange

Private school jackets will become the rage in the PAW

Don’t bother looking for tanks in the PAW since the anti-social hermits with a thing for kidnapping high school teenage girls will create one in 30 days

Apparently society will gather itself up after 30 days and create shanty towns complete with structures and everything (like a North American version of “Barter Town” without the pigs, Tina Turner and Thunderdome)

High school students will run the militias

An Army Fort will be run by an Air Force E-2 in the PAW

NASA and the USAF standards for astronauts went way down before the making of this movie

Apparently Caterpillar tractors converted to tanks can go for days without running out of gas

So no, probably not a great deal to be learned from the movie.

It’s your typical B Rate PAW movie that failed from about the first ten minutes…maybe five… okay, in reality the first thirty seconds. No real plot, no cool BAMF characters of the 1980s we were used to seeing, horrid acting and low budget special effects.

Makes for an hour and twenty minutes of your life you’ll never get back.

You summed that up PERFECTLY!!! LMAO

New use for sealand containers- CAGES! LOL

If I can get Protus a little two wheel dolly, I know he'll find some slaves to pull him around in- the Lt. of the high school leader guy.

Love the neck clamp deal when people are brought into talk to Mr. Big.. LMAO

You gotta watch MOST of these movies for entertainment (read Humor) value.

Find and watch "Warlords of the 21st Century." Now that actually was about the best B grade Post apoc I think I've seen. Won't spoil it for you, but suffice to say the yuppie "we don't need guns- or even those crazy "assualt rifles" ;) types will be out hunting real weaponry after watching this.

"Come out and throw down your weapons, or I will level this village!"

I mean Wes Huntley from "The Survivors" (80's Robin Williams film) is in it for crying out loud, so you KNOW it's gotta be good! LOL

[WiseOwl]

I have one of those Private School Jackets in my BOB just incase I need to show who is boss..:)

[Lowdown3]

Wait till you look out the front of your retreat in the PAW and see Adam Ant being towed up to the gate in an old helicopter by 50 teenage boys in choir outfits....

Anyone seen THAT one?

[Metal]

Could it be world gone wild?

[1Admin]

And Bingo was his Name O!!!

Yep that was it.

How about the one about the quasi survival group trying to all get to their retreat right as a nuclear war is supposedly going to start. For some reason all the kids of the family all ride together with a 17 year old kid and their van breaks down....

[Triple-sod]

Retrieved from the Future by John Seymour was a book I enjoyed especially since it was set here in the U.K.

Seymour has always been a legend in my eyes ever since I read his Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency. I’m sure I’ve linked a pdf copy on here at least once, it’s certainly a book I refer back to a lot. After that I tried to read as much of his work as possible, and I've built up quite a collection. So when I heard he’d wrote a piece of fiction I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it, and perhaps predictably, I was a bit disappointed when I did.

Basically he’d decided to write the book as an account of the collapse from the perspective of about five different people. Now this might have actually worked quite well, had they lived in different parts of the country but as it happened they were all recounting the same events in the same village, which for me kind of defeats the objective. Then you throw in the fact that a lot of the book is written in Suffolk dialect and it’s a pretty hard book to read.

I persisted on though and I’m really glad I did.

Anyway the plot revolves around Bob Hurlock who steadfastly rejects the industrial methods of ‘London farming’ instead farming his land along much more traditional lines. (No prizes for guessing who Seymour based that character on). At this point in the novel we’re a few years into ‘the future’ and he drops a few hints that all is not rosy.

‘The crash’ however comes primarily from ‘the oil running out’ and Seymour provides a decent hypothesis as to how that might pan out. The cities of course immediately fall into chaos, the government collapses and the army steps in to maintain order. Out in the sticks things are a little better but being a farming man Seymour foresees the effect this would have on industrial agriculture. Luckily Hurlock is there to step in and they eventually start to divide up the vast farms into patches of land people can work by hand.

All is going pretty well until the army move in and start to really antagonize the locals. Of course they’re all city folk who know nothing about what’s going on but they want to take over, and get as much food as possible back to the cities. It all comes to a head when they move in on Hurlock’s farm to take what’s his, he resists this and end up being shipped off to a prison camp.

This however is short lived as soon he’s reunited with friends and they stage an escape capturing a few weapons in the process. What else is there to do but start a guerrilla war?............

Hopefully I’ve done the plot justice there, obviously I’ve had to simplify it a fair bit but it is pretty well thought out. As I say in general I really enjoyed the book. Certainly a cut above what we usually get over here when it comes to this sort of fiction.