No room to run! No place to hide! Maddened by fear they turn against each other!

No Blade of Grass is a cheesy but brutal, but cheesy, 1970 survival film adapted from John Christopher’s excellent debut novel The Death of Grass.

A virus has destroyed all the edible crops around the world, and the resulting famine spreads first from India to China, then west into Europe. Dashing, one-eyed architect John Custace (Nigel Davenport) strives to escape London with his family and an ever-growing band of survivors as society rapidly breaks down around them.

Director Cornel Wilde transforms Christopher’s story into a crude, loud exploitation flick featuring bizarrely tinted flash-forwards, horn-helmeted motorcycle gangs, stillborn babies, gushing fake blood, and slaughtered housewives.

The movie opens with a stock-footage montage of polluted rivers, traffic jams, starving children and dead birds over which folk-singer Roger Whittaker sings a depressingly overwrought ballad. Wilde takes the darker plot elements of the book and detonates them into a cacophony of gunshots, ear-splittingly obtuse period music cues, and lots of screaming.

So much screaming.

It’s an over-saturated, feverish work, closer in tone to the Hammer Horror films than to classic 70’s science-fiction such as The Andromeda Strain and Soylent Green, but it’s an enjoyable romp for fans of lurid post-apocalyptic mayhem nevertheless.

Have a funderful day, everyone!