DAY OF RESURRECTION (1980)

The internets claim this was the most expensive Japanese movie ever made at the time it was released, and it was a huge flop.  Bummer.  The cut in America was missing about an hour and was retitled Virus so it would be more obvious what it was about, but it came at the tail end of the epic disaster movie craze so nobody was interested.  People are always worried about germs or parasites or viruses or some kind of creature they can't see that wants to gobble up their insides: ebola, SARS, bird flu, swine flu, turtle flu, etc.  Hopefully this movie will find a larger audience especially since it's available for free.  Early on in the film title cards lay out the stakes for us: A super-virus leaves only 843 people left alive on Earth.  How did it get this bad and where will it go from here?

American productions are usually 'globetrotting' in the sense that they cut away to SFX shots of easily recognizable foreign cities being decimated by various calamities.  But when foreign films go skipping around the globe, a multitude of different locations are featured.  I remember seeing Washington DC, the University of Maryland, Tokyo, Italy, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Uganda, Russia, Kazakhstan, Peru, Chile and Antarctica.  Maybe they didn't really visit all those locations, but the virus in this film really does fell like a global pandemic, and not just America's problem or whichever other country the protagonist calls home.

The main character is scientist from Japan chosen to join a research team at a remote Antarctic laboratory.  He leaves behind his possibly pregnant wife but when the viral apocalypse strikes their reunion is denied.  Antarctica ends up being the cool spot where everybody wants to hang out, mostly since the virus can't reproduce at low temperatures.  Italy has the worst luck, with the first reported cases leading the international media to dub the plague the 'Italian Flu' and you better believe every character refers to it this way or as MM-88 which doesn't have quite the same ring.

Some of the American characters are played by actors straight out of the stock cast of American-made disaster pictures, like George Kennedy as a tough old admiral or Robert Vaughan as a weaselly yet noble senator.  Edward James Olmos appears as a Latin-American survivor who wants to use the new found forced equality on planet Earth to badmouth Argentina and fight people, but later he makes up for it by playing the piano, singing beautifully in Spanish, and giving somebody an origami unicorn.  Glenn Ford plays the US President, and his chairman of the joint chiefs of staff is Henry Silva, a laughably cliched bloodthirsty General who dooms most of humanity twice over but whose greatest crime is the ridiculous tough hood accent he managed to keep so long into a distinguished military career.

This movie goes darker places than most stories about a virus potentially wiping out all vertebrate life on earth (oh yeah its not just us).  Repopulating the Earth is even more difficult than it sounds, because of the 843 survivors, only 8 are female.  When one of the female survivors in the research base claims she is raped, guess which country's representative jumps up to offer excuses about 'human nature' and 'its to be expected'?  Go on, guess.  If you selected France, you have been correctly following this movie's stereotypes thus far.  But at least somebody has the decency to refer to women as 'our most valuable natural resource' and mandate a breeding schedule to keep them constantly pregnant and nursing; and its another woman!

You won't find a cliched hero, making the tough calls that no one else will to save the earth here.  There are submarines, plane crashes, ice bases, nuclear war, spy-jinks, riots, child suicide, murder, secret underground doomsday machines, and a foot journey from Washington DC to Tierra Del Fuego with a detour to Machu Picchu.  All of those things on top of the virus, which seems to work by turning any other virus in your body into a super-powered version of itself; if you have a cold, and you get the Italian flu, it will make the cold strong enough to kill you.  The ending of the film is uplifting, even though only 843 people survive, and the length and scope of the film, not to mention its concern with actual humanity instead of over-sized cartoon emotions, help to distinguish it from a typical virus/disaster movie.

But I think the biggest difference that sets this film apart from others is best illustrated in the scene where somebody brings up Heaven after a child dies.  What happens?  Somebody beats the shit out of him.