'NO BLADE OF GRASS'......A WILDE VIRUS AHEAD OF ITS TIME........

No Blade Of Grass (1970)   We always found ourselves comparing actor Cornel Wilde's directorial career to Mel Gibson's......

            Wilde may have worked with way lower budgets then Gibson, but their directing projects struck us as similar.........simple primal stories told with a heavy reliance on over-the-top violence.....

             His 1965 cult hit "The Naked Prey" is still revered for its singular primitive force in depicting an African safari guide (played by the director) hunted down by vengeful natives.......and personally, we've always been a fan of his sumptuous take on Arthurian lore in 1963's "Sword Of Lancelot".....

            Wilde took on nothing less than global environmental  apocalypse in "No Blade Of Grass".....in which a mutant virus kills off  not just your front lawn grass, but all the grains on the planet.......

            Hunger, riots, rape, murder and the collapse of civilization as we know it follow in lightning speed.......never a subtle director, Wilde opens the film with a lengthy montage of  worldwide toxic pollution and wastes no time instantly turning  British cities and suburbs into a 'Mad Max' carnival of carnage......(complete with bikers sporting horned helmets)

              In a Wilde pandemic, no one's got time to sit around and binge 'Dr Who' on the telly......everybody's gotta hit the road.....fully armed.

              That may be why no one took the movie seriously.......the film's sturdy band of survivors (Nigel Davenport, Jean Wallace, Lynn Frederick, Anthony May, among others) quickly turn to shooting people by the dozens........and hardly anyone agonizes or even notices their swift conversion to savagery.

               Granted, the rapists who brutally assault Jean Wallace and Lynn Frederick have it coming, but pretty soon everyone's getting into the apocalyptic spirit by blasting away at each other with mad abandon......

                 By the time Davenport and his bedraggled followers reach what he thought would be the safe haven of his brother's country estate, sure enough they've got to fight their way in.......racking up even more casualties in the film's already burgeoning body count.......

                 Throughout the film, we're never quite sure which part of this story Cornel Wilde's interested in.......the stern warning to clean up our act on this planet (literally) or all the sustained sequences of people machine gunning and shotgun blasting each other ......we suppose he thought the urgent message would come across better if he marinated it in lots of grindhouse gore......

                  On the minus side, Wilde dilutes his blunt trauma filmmaking style with a lot of that superfluous visual hoo-hah that directors everywhere where playing around with like kids with new toys.....excessive flashbacks, flash-forwards, jump cuts, reverse coloring..........annoying 'look-at-me' stuff that instantly dates the film.....and not in a good way.

                     Crude and mostly far-fetched in its characters' behavior, Wilde's swift storytelling still commands your attention and makes it watchable..........but even Wilde and writers couldn't conceive of a virus pandemic like our current one......where the most powerful and most afflicted nation on earth is led by a babbling, demented idiot.....

                      Who'd believe it?

                     At least in "No Blade Of Grass", no world "leader" recommends spraying the fields with Clorox to cure the crops.......2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)