Apocalypse (1998)

'My Grandmother is completely convinced that the world is about to end.' 'She was talking about that during the Gulf War. Let's just hope she's wrong again.' Made on video with an Ed Woodian assemblage of stock footage 'shot on six continents', this was a significant, trail-blazing film in the tiny sub-genre of fundamentalist Christian 'end times' movies, leading to sequels (Tribulation, Revelation, Judgement) and healthier-budgeted imitations (Left Behind, The Omega Code).

Taking a cue from the much-debated prophetic books of the Bible and the best-selling Left Behind novels, the film follows the rise of the Antichrist, here the President of the European Union Franco Macalusso (Sam Bornstein), who intervenes in a literal Battle of Armageddon and claims responsibility for the sudden disappearance of nuclear weapons in flight (Headline: 'MESSIAH ARRIVES, NUKES VANISH!') which accompanies a Rapture that has not only removed the faithful bodily to Heaven but neatly folded their abandoned clothes. Proclaiming himself the Messiah, and accepted by Catholic, Jewish and Islamic talking heads, Macalusso brokers a seven-year peace treaty in the Middle East and turns the world against the remaining Christians, whom he characterises as 'haters' who ought to be rounded up and executed to live television. Among the new-minted clichés of the form are Christian rock music on the soundtrack, empty clothes and crashed cars to convey the Rapture, appearances from real-life televangelists (on videos of their pre-Rapture programmes, since it's implied they will be among the godly transported to Heaven before everyone else suffers the apocalypse), an identification of the Antichrist with America's idea of foreign ('the European Union is virtually identical geographically to the Roman Empire of Biblical times') and well-intentioned but unsaved protagonists who achieve or regain their faith during the film.

As in Left Behind, the viewpoint characters are TV journos who struggle to faith: Helen Hannah (Leigh Lewis) and Bronson Pearl (Richard Nester) have soap operatic arguments about the situation ('Oh and you can tell your God if He's got something to say to me He knows where I live') but find faith in tearful praying and Bible-reading scenes. An ironic finale, which leaves room for the sequels, has a Judas within the Antichrist's sewn-up TV station betray his conniving boss Len Parker (David Roddis) by broadcasting Pearl's suppressed indictment of the Antichrist and an old tape of real-life minister and backer of this film Jack Van Impe inspiring a presumed worldwide revival. There's a reluctance to dramatise fictional violence, (Parker's murder of someone standing in the way of the Antichrist is conveyed by an offscreen gunshot) which sits ill with the exploitative use of acres of war and disaster footage wrestled into the context of this story, and the aesthetic is somewhere between afternoon soap opera and mondo-style ranting mock documentary. The last-reel assault on the faithful ('the world is indeed united in a common hatred of Christianity and Jesus Christ') evokes the holocaust as Christians are rounded up by stungun-wielding goons and has a crude force that works for its intended audience, though is hardly likely to impress the doubtful.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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