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Directed by Jack Sholder

Written by Wiliam Prochnau and Bruce Gilbert

Starring:
- Powers Boothe as Maj. Cassidy
- Rebecca De Mornay as Capt. Moreau
- James Earl Jones as Looking Glass General - 'Alice'
- Martin Landau as President

If it involves isotopes, Doc willl fap...

Produced in 1990, By Dawn's Early Light is one of the last pieces of Nuclear scare-cinema churned out during the Cold War. I remember seeing this when it came out on HBO and being fairly impressed. For starters, the cast is chocked full of A-list and very good B-list actors. Landau, Boothe and Jones were pretty impressive players for a made-for-cable movie when this one was shot, not to mention Rip Torn and the still-incredibly-hot Rebecca De Mornay. And no, we do not see De Mornaynude. In what might very well be one of the last gasps of true 80's Action, all we get is a flash of her stellar, creamy legs minutes before being exposed to a big, nude male ass. No kidding. De Mornaykeeps her tits in her shirt and as a consolation prize, we get Man-Hole. There wasn't even a neck-up love scene for us. Boothe carries her into a hotel room and slams the door shut with a thrown boot. They may as well have been playing canasta in there for all we know.

But the movie starts to make up for that fairly early on. You see, Boothe and De Mornay, in addition to being late night canasta buddies, also happen to be pilot and copilot on the same B-52 bomber tasked with bringing 20 little loads of plutonium-death to the Soviets' doorstep on a moment's notice. Soon, that moment arises and one of the most horrifyingly realistic clusterfucks in cinematic history begins to unfold. Realistic? Well, the special effects suck cock. Big, smegma-coated hobo cocks in syphillis sauce. Seriously. Even the sets blow. As nukeporn goes, this barely rates a single throb on the old choad-o-meter where Threads and Trinity And Beyond had me beating off like a rabid rhesus monkey on viagra. You get a single mushroom cloud and it was absolutely pitiful. Worse than The Day After. The shots of a nuclear doubleflash over Washington were just sad and the shockwave effect looked like somebody turning a leafblower on a dollhouse and then chucking gravel through the window. Don't even get me started on the matte paintings of a burning D.C. and Baton Rouge. My five year-old could have done better with crayons. Then again, he is my megaton loving kid.

No, the special effects aren't what I'm referring to when I say "realistic." I'm talking about the political situation after the attack begins. You see, the Vice President and most of the Cabinet were vaporized by the first bomb to hit D.C. This leaves the President incapacitated and in the very capable hands of FEMA -- and the country being run by none other than the Secretary of the Interior played by a very believable Darrin McGavin. Unfortunately for the world at large, the Secretary of the Interior is a complete and total idiot. He only gets about every third word of the situational briefing and constantly thinks in terms of "winning" and "losing". As if anybody could possibly "win" or "lose" a nuclear war between equally matched forces. To make things worse, he's got a totally apeshit-insane Army Colonel played by Torn giving him information straight out the 1950's. The guy quotes Lenin and tells the unfortunately acting president that the Soviets are basically insane and are willing to sustain massive losses to achieve "their goal." Torn never actually says what that goal is, but the Secretary is hooked. All the while, a Navy Admiral played by DeMunn is vainly trying to explain that the Soviets are interested in defusing the thousand-megaton threat the entire northern hemisphere is currently sitting on. As a response, he's handcuffed to a wall and the apeshit Colonel talks the Secretary into the nuclear equivalent of Aaron McGruder's "nigga moment." Sound familiar? More on that later.

In the meantime, De Mornay, Boothe and their crew are basically imploding. One guy buys it because he got his head rammed through an instrument panel. Another crewmember is going seriously batshit because his family just got vaporized. De Mornaygets half-blinded because she refused to close her cockpit curtains on account of the risk of hitting a civilian airliner. The entire situation is going completely to shit. Every carefully prepared plan in the book is devolving into a hydrothermal fuckup. James Earl Jones is chain-smoking while trying to make sense of the obviously clueless idiot in charge, the President is laying in an improbably clean and orderly FEMA bunker and the Soviet President is getting hung up on by a FEMA lackey. Truly, everybody and everyone is indelibly fucked. This is the real face of intercontinental nuclear war: Blind fools driving deaf horses on a dark road straight into the jaws of a raging furnace. That's the realistic part of the movie and one of its few redeeming features. That a political flunkie stuffed into a meaningless position might one day actually wind up in charge of something important. Like the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

The movie has plenty of worthwhile moments in it and, while it's not quite worth the DVD purchase price, it would definitely make a great rainy day veiwing experience. Where else will you get to see Powers Boothe flying a nuclear bomber? If I had a vagina, it'd be wetter than a Bombay monsoon right now. Powers Boothe. Flying a nuclear bomber. That's cooler than Steve McQueen doing Raquel Welch doggystyle and putting his cigarette out in her cornhole. And the scene where he dropped a nuclear bomb, then turned the bomber around just so he could see the mushroom cloud was off the fap-o-meter. Unfortunately, we never see Boothe peel off De Mornay's flight suit, bend her over the throttle panel and go for the Fuck To End Humanity. And I still can't understand why she never showed her unbeleivably beautiful body. Rebecca, Risky Business is the reason I can braid the hair on my palm. Please, for the love of all that is good in this rotten world, show us your tits again. Please? Just for old time's sake.

An aside: You know, the first time I heard of the fuckup in new Orleans, I thought of this movie. One crony in the wrong place at the wrong time fucked up thousands of lives. And of course he wasn't prepared for the job. The man was simply stuffed into a position in thanks for some obscure favor he did for the ruling regime and, the first time his position suddenly became important, his brain takes a fucking day off and thousands suffer. And while that wasn't exactly the point of By Dawn's Early Light, it sure as hell is pertinent now.

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Review Posted: 2.15.06