*****SPOILERS**** Futuristic-type movie made back in 1962 about an impending USSR nuclear missile attack on America and how it effected a number of motorists and a deputy sheriff stranded in the dark and cold California desert.
We see the people start to panic as the hour minute and second of doom gets closer and closer and how all civility as well as the respect for law and order starts to fall apart. The movie for a while takes on an almost soap opera-like quality as some of the people there, Karen and Al, begin to have an affair at the expense of Karen's husband Sam which leads him to get very depressed and later to kill himself.
There is also Clint who's an escaped psycho murder who hitched a ride with Al, on his tractor-trailer, who takes off when Sheriff Colter tries to talk to him. Clint ends up hiding in the desert brush popping up in the movie every now and them. Clint seems to be there for no other reason but to show the audience that he's still around when the world comes to an end.
By far the most interesting person in the movie "This is not a test" was Sheriff Colter who we see changed from a cool and in charge type of guy to an paranoid lunatic. Sheriff gets every one into Al's tractor-trailer and stuffs the air vents with mud to keep the radioactive air out after the inevitable nuclear blast. Which was really dumb on his part since without air, radioactive or otherwise, you can't survive.
Colter also goes nuts when he spotted Karen's little dog, for a moment Colter was looking at the poor mutt like he wanted to eat it, and crazily grabs and kills it by twisting it's head off why? According to Colter the dog was using up the air inside the truck. Colter becomes almost as dangerous as the coming nuclear blast is to the people who had the sad misfortune to be stuck with him as he loses his grip on things more the anyone, with the possible exception of Clint, else of the movie.
Pretty effective for a low-budget movie with a cast of unknowns that doesn't cop-out in the end as you would have expected it too. It's good to see that it's available on DVD for people to view it and see just what kind of fear and terror of a nuclear war that was on the minds of so many Americans back then in 1962 the year that a real nuclear war almost broke out during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
