Tucked in the apocalyptic rocking chair between Arch Oboler’s FIVE (1951) and George Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) is this independently-financed, ultra low budget curio, which never had a proper theatrical release but became something of a late, late show staple.  When the United States’ military high command calls a Yellow Alert in the face of approaching nuclear missiles, a California Highway Patrol cop (Seamon Glass) is ordered to establish a roadblock to prevent the passage of motor vehicles into “the city” a scant twenty five miles away.  (The municipality is never named but all references to it point squarely at San Francisco.)  As more and more motorists find themselves in for the night on the side of a lonely stretch of two-lane blacktop (“You never can tell what you’re gonna run into at four o’clock in the morning”), Deputy Sheriff Dan Colter enforces his own brand of martial law to keep the peace among a veritable ship of fools of frightened citizens:  elderly chicken rancher Jacob Eliot Saunders (Thayer Roberts) and his daughter Juney (Aubrey Martin), North Beach hepcats Joe Baragi (Michael Greene) and Cheryl Hudson (Mary Morlas), middle-aged married couple Sam (Norman Bartold, billed as “Norman Winston”) and Karen (Carol Kent) Barnes and long-haul trucker Al Weston (Alan Austin), whose hitchhiking companion (Ron Starr) is a psychotic killer on the run from the authorities.

Maybe it all began with John Huston’s KEY LARGO (1948), a loose adaptation of the play by Maxwell Anderson, which trapped its desperate and combative dramatis personae for a portion of its running time in a Florida hotel during a tropical storm, but filmmakers working during the Atomic Age seemed incapable of spinning an end of the world narrative that didn’t involve a group of strangers sitting around getting on one another’s nerves.  Such was the case with FIVE, the first post-Apocalypse drama to come out of the pipe, and the tack was carried over to Roger Corman’s DAY THE WORLD ENDED (1955), which was remade even more statically as IN THE YEAR 2889 (1967).  THIS IS NOT A TEST backs the formula up a bit to focus not on life after the blast but just prior to … and the TWILIGHT ZONE fan in each of us may find himself suspecting throughout that all of the sturm und drang will turn out to be so much Cold War paranoia in the long run.

True to form, THIS IS NOT A TEST‘s cast of characters are a clutch of stock types meant to represent the good, the bad and the ugly of American society.  While Farmer Saunders and Juney are depicted as unalloyed salt of the earthers, hipster Joe is a jive-talking swindler who has just made the killing of a lifetime yet suddenly finds he has nowhere to spend his ill-gotten gains.  If Joe is meant to represent American acquisitiveness at its most base and selfish, then surely Sam and Karen Barnes are the very picture of sexless, middle class complacency (the degraded nature of their marriage points to the bickering Harry and Helen Cooper of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD) while Deputy Sheriff Colter is a Golem-like despot bent on keeping the peace by any means necessary.  What’s interesting is that director Fredric Gadette and cowriters Peter Abenheim and Betty Lasky, don’t pick a side at the coin toss between blind allegiance to authority and the shucking of personal responsibility. What distinguishes THIS IS NOT A TEST from the similar PANIC IN YEAR ZERO (released the same year) and other atomic fear films of its vintage is an understanding that bravery, altruism, selfishness and madness are but points on the same behavioral continuum.

Coming to THIS IS NOT A TEST (a reversal of the old “this is only a test” disclaimer seen in public address spots for the Emergency Broadcast System) forty years after the fact, an air of Psychotronic kitsch is perhaps unavoidable.  The film’s obvious lack of wherewithal, the stridulous overplaying of some of the performers (in particular Mary Morlas who, it bears mentioning, isn’t meant not to be irritating) and the in-your face floridness of the writing…

“First thing will be a white light that’ll blind us.  Then a hot flame that’ll burn everything… But that’s not all.  Even the air you breathe will be deadly.  Everything you touch will give off radiation.  Ever hear of Hiroshima?  And you won’t hear it… it’ll happen suddenly.  There’ll be no warning.”

… goes for the big gesture when simple human behavior would have been more welcome (as was the case in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, where characters argued specific talking points without resorting to soliloquy).  And yet THIS IS NOT A TEST has something… and nothing in greater abundance than the courage of its convictions.

Perhaps the film’s boldest move is the depiction of the gradual mental decline of its own putitive protagonist, Deputy Sheriff Colter.  Played with lock-jawed intractability  by Seamon Glass, Colter is the first character seen and becomes, at least for the film’s first act, someone with whom viewers can identify.  Colter’s no genius but he has his assignment and he has his orders and none of his commands feel ego-driven or unorthodox in any way, at least initially.  When he identifies the psychotic Clint Delaney (“He stabbed that Ramsey girl to death”), he puts himself heroically between the killer and his charges.  It is only as the film progresses and the personalities of the stranded motorists begin to impinge upon the narrative that Colter begins to seem unhinged by this experience… unprepared mentally and spiritually to handle the burden of shepherding these people through the fire.  After he hits on the idea of using Al’s tractor trailer as a bomb shelter even, he refuses to hear arguments that the vehicle will provide inadequate protection from the initial blast, let along the radioactive fallout.  Ultimately, the group divides, with Jacob, Juney and a late-arrival (Don Spruance) going their own way while Colter lords over the others inside the sweltering big rig.  The filmmakers reserve acts of violence for the final third, with one hopeless character blowing off his head (offscreen) with Colter’s scattergun, Colter strangling a pet dog (“You’ll be glad we don’t have that pair of lungs when you’re gaspin’ for breath.”) and the presumed rape of another character when the make-do shelter is breached by looters.  The film ends not with the breakaway flight of the story’s true protagonists but with the desperation of Colter, who finds himself in the final frames locked outside of his own sanctuary, his only companion the child-like Clint Delaney as the sky goes bright with the flash of ICBMs hitting home.

Most of the talent behind THIS IS NOT A TEST came from television and the production was the seeming end of the road for many of these folks, among them the director, writers and producers.  Director of photography Brick Marquard (whose aesthetic here is strictly point and shoot) later lensed the Scott Brady stinkers CASTLE OF EVIL and DESTINATION INNER SPACE (both 1966), FOXY BROWN (1974) for Jack Hill and several episodes of ADAM-12 and EMERGENCY.  Composer Guy McRitchie is better known for authoring the infectious Rice-a-Roni jingle than for his long career as a studio orchestrator (BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA, the 1978 remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, 48 HRS., CONAN THE BARBARIAN, DANCES WITH WOLVES).  Among the actors, Thayer Roberts was a seasoned stage actor rarely seen on the big screen (he died in 1968) while Seamon Glass later turned up as one of the boondock haints of DELIVERANCE (1972) and Michael Greene starred in the low budget sci-fi oddity THE CLONES (1973) and played William Peterson’s doomed partner in William Friedkin’s TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. (1985). Already a veteran film and TV actor with a decade of experience under his belt, Norman Bartold (who ran fatally afoul of The Black Knight in WESTWORLD) likely used the alias “Norman Winston” for union purposes, while Ron Starr (whose character seems patterned after convicted killer William Heirens, subject of Fritz Lang’s WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS) had a good-sized supporting role in Sam Peckinpah’s RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962).  (Curiously, Starr shares a quiet scene with Aubrey Martin, who bears a passing resemblance to the actor’s future wife, Meg Foster.)  Seen among the rather Old School gaggle of looters late in the film is character actor Ralph Manza, whose film credits range from I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (1958) to GODZILLA (1998), but who is perhaps best known as the sage chauffeur to George Peppard’s cocky TV detective BANACEK.

THIS IS NOT A TEST was first made available on DVD in 2002 from those intrepid vault raiders at Something Weird Video, on a flipper disc with the Eastern block drama ATOMIC WAR BRIDE (RAT, 1960). The disc is still available to buy from SWV or to download for half the price.  The feature has since been re-issued on its own by the cheap-o bootleg outfit Alpha Video, which is the version currently available for rental from Netflix.