Actor Cornel Wilde mans the camera for this adaptation of John ‘Tripods’ Christopher’s grain shortage apocalypse, with Nigel Davenport leaving a doomed London en famille and pegging it up to his brother’s farm in Scotland, blasting everyone who gets in his way, among them Ruth Kettlewell and Wendy Richard. As well as the Trevelyan-baiting violence, there’s Wilde’s modish editing to deal with, full of flash-forwards, random coloured filters and an opening quarter-hour of peripatetic cutting that makes Performance look like a Party Political Broadcast. And there’s acres of factory chimney/murky stream footage to really hammer that ‘we’re choking the planet’ message. Still, it’s chipper stuff in the ever-popular Survivors mould.
