By Kathleen Murphy
Special to MSN Movies

Have you ever noticed how orgasmically the world often ends in the movies? Tell the truth, when we cowboy that big, bucking nuke into the ground in Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove," aren't we whooping, "Stop the world ... I want to get off!"?

In the blinding white light triggered by nuclear holocaust, gray reality is erased, the slate wiped clean. Bathed in that baptizing incandescence, do we -- safe out in the dark -- momentarily dream of starting from scratch, rebuilding a new and better world?

Trouble is, in the aftermath of apocalypse, even Strangelovers come down to earth in some godforsaken corner of hell. It's after The End that grim truth really grabs us by the short and curlies!

Two recent doomsday movies paint the post-apocalypse very differently: When Stephen King's "The Mist" breeds unspeakable monsters that take over the world (or at least King's corner of Maine), human community dead-ends in religious fanaticism, intellectual denial and suicidal despair. (Sounds like today's headlines!) In "Southland Tales," Richard Kelly's visionary misfire, a rash of nuclear attacks in Texas only ratchets up the pop-cult paranoia and nihilism we already live with -- until reality itself ruptures.

Whether the world ends with a bang or a whimper -- and what horrors come afterward -- depends on your doomsday scenario of choice: Big bombs go boom, or there's alien invasion (see "Battlestar Galactica"), screwed-up scientific experiments, global warming, overpopulation, pollution, plague and just plain wickedness.

It's man-made disease that kills off humanity in the high concept, holiday sci-fi actioner "I Am Legend," the third film version of Richard Matheson's chilling novella. Like Vincent Price ("The Last Man on Earth") and Charlton Heston ("The Omega Man") before him, Will Smith is left behind in an empty metropolis, to find a cure and fight off infected mutants.

To gear up for "Legend," let's check out what postapocalyptic real estate looks like in the movies, and what kind of folks take up residence in the ruins.

Black Death

To the 14th-century inhabitants of Europe, the Black Plague that wiped out almost two-thirds of the population signaled that God was terminally ticked off at humanity. Nowadays, we're freaked out by pandemics, mutating bacteria that outgun antibiotics, scientists and soldiers who spawn world-ending plagues.

"The Last Man on Earth" (1964) begins with Vincent Price going through the familiar motions of starting a new day, everything normal as apple pie in his cozy California ranch-house. Then our Everyman saunters outside -- and doesn't even spare a glance for the corpses sprawled grotesquely on his lawn and driveway. Reality tilts, and the black-and-white film's slightly overexposed sunlight takes on a radioactive sheen.

A runaway virus has wiped out everyone, then mutated the dead into zombie-vampires. Now Price spends his days patrolling the cemetery Los Angeles has become, staking the dead. He gets through the nights knocking back shots and listening to modern jazz, to muffle the hungry moaning outside.

Building visceral horror out of off-kilter ordinariness and no-exit despair, the Italian-made "Last Man" majorly influenced George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead," which hit screens just four years later.

The World Without Us

One of the perverse pleasures of postapocalyptic cinema comes from contemplating the world without us. Remember those iconic shots of Harry Belafonte in "The World, the Flesh and the Devil" (1959), a tiny figure standing in the uninhabited canyons of Manhattan? And, in "The Day After Tomorrow" (2004), what a strange and alien urbanscape the Big Apple becomes, drowned then frozen in the wake of global warming. End times really hit home when the camera in "Testament" (1983) pans down the dim, tree-lined streets of a depopulated Norman Rockwell small town.

Adrift in wastelands, what's left of humanity looks insignificant and vulnerable. And such barren, unforgiving expanses testify to the terrible wounding of the earth itself. Luc Besson's black-and-white "Le Dernier Combat" ("The Last Battle," 1983) plays out in deserted office buildings and streets edged by eerie, bleached-out badlands. A gang of grotesques -- their white-suited capo sports a necklace of fingers -- holes up in the husks of wrecked cars, French kin to the berserkers who rule the sun-baked Outback in "The Road Warrior" (1981).

Postapocalyptic Community

When it comes to versions of community cobbled together after Judgment Day, movies often get preachy. Cautionary tales spotlight the outbreak of precisely the kind of prejudice and human stupidity that blew things up to begin with. Other approaches push idealistic solutions to the extreme, ending up with soul-killing dystopias ("The Handmaid's Tale," 1990; "Logan's Run," 1976). Like the far darker "Testament," TV's "Jericho" focuses on practical, everyday solutions, acknowledging the ways post-catastrophe community alternately stands firm and breaks down.

In the oddball "Ever Since the World Ended" (2001), a couple of San Francisco filmmakers decide to document how things are -- in a post-plague community of 100 -- for future generations. Sitting around a dining room table, an enclave of articulate, attractive feminist-types (packing heat) discuss practical arrangements -- with a somewhat flustered young guy -- for getting one of them with child. Elsewhere, a neighborhood group grapples with what to do with a former medic, once traumatized into acts of arson, who's come back from exile. A brave, mad vote for normalcy, social responsibility and political correctness -- in the heart of darkness.

In "Soylent Green" (1973) what passes for civilization has become so dehumanizing that the only sane move is suicide -- a choice that has been institutionalized and incorporated into the shrinking food chain. Post-pandemic, Stephen King's "The Stand" (TV, 1995) turns what's left of the world into a battleground between good and evil -- which, unfortunately, looks more cartoon than cosmic.

Racism often rears its ugly head in post-holocaust flicks. Made half a decade after the end of WWII, the ultra-low-budget "Five" features a European übermensch who displays killing contempt for a black survivor -- a gentle man, clearly bedrock on which to build a decent future -- and claims the single remaining woman as his personal property.

"The World, the Flesh and the Devil" skitters around the problem of repopulating Earth by means of a black Adam and a very blond Eve. And, the surviving ménage-à-trois in "The Quiet Earth" (1985) features a suicidal scientist partly responsible for the end of the world, an Aboriginal man-of-action and the last Sheila -- who must pick brain or brawn.

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