A 1957 Roger Corman non epic in which a sundry bunch of characters end up in a lead lined valley (sic) just as stock footage thermo-nuclear heck is unleashed. It's the end of the world. Four men with guns, two women, (one an unmarried virgin the other a Las Vegas show girl who drinks and smokes - guess which one makes it to the end of the movie?) Time passes, tensions develop (or are supposed to). Something is in the woods eating radioactive rabbits. A mutant monster! Seven weeks of radioactive dust has performed "a million years of evolution" (on an already living human) the result is a laughably bad, zip up the back, rubber monster who is strangely scared of their only source of fresh water. It rains. The monster dissolves. The remaining two characters, the Hunk and the Virgin. set out to repopulate the world as the caption 'The Beginning' fills the screen after it transpires that the brief shower of rain had washed all the radioactivity away and dissolved all the monsters running around 'out there'.
The only thing of real note about this is the incredible amount of 'curtain acting' that goes on in it. One of the staple elements of bad and lo budget movie making of the period was the superabundant use of curtains in the set design. It was cheap. Finished with one set-up? Pull a curtain across, drop a different piece of furniture in front of it and you have a different location in minutes without having to move the camera or change the lighting.
'Curtain acting' is a skill in which the actor will get to comment on what's going on outside any building he happens to be in ("It looks like Rain", or "Here they come now, and it looks like they've got the sheriff with them!", that sort of stuff). He'll do this by standing to one side of the window - reaching across his body and lifting the curtain away from the window but along the axis of the shot - ie towards the camera - thus enabling him to pretend to look out and tell us what's happening off screen, without letting the audience see he's staring at the studio wall three inches away from his nose behind some cheap velvet curtains. There was a lot of that in this movie.
The only thing of real note about this is the incredible amount of 'curtain acting' that goes on in it. One of the staple elements of bad and lo budget movie making of the period was the superabundant use of curtains in the set design. It was cheap. Finished with one set-up? Pull a curtain across, drop a different piece of furniture in front of it and you have a different location in minutes without having to move the camera or change the lighting.
'Curtain acting' is a skill in which the actor will get to comment on what's going on outside any building he happens to be in ("It looks like Rain", or "Here they come now, and it looks like they've got the sheriff with them!", that sort of stuff). He'll do this by standing to one side of the window - reaching across his body and lifting the curtain away from the window but along the axis of the shot - ie towards the camera - thus enabling him to pretend to look out and tell us what's happening off screen, without letting the audience see he's staring at the studio wall three inches away from his nose behind some cheap velvet curtains. There was a lot of that in this movie.