Remember those guys who kept a thousand cans of tuna in their basement because they were absolutely, 100% that Y2K would be the end of the world? Calvin Webber, the character that Christopher Walken (who else?) plays in Blast From the Past, is like that. He's a engineer at Cal Tech who freaks out during the Cuban Missile Crisis, making his pregnant wife Helen (Sissy Spacek) head down the fallout shelter he build under the house. Then, in a coincidence that can be excused because otherwise the movie would be very short, a plane crashes into Webber home. This makes the already paranoid Calvin think WWIII has started and activate the time locks on the shelter- so they won't be tempted to leave before the fallout dies away. For some reason, spending thirty five years in a fallout shelter doesn't really appeal to Helen and she starts to drink a lot after she has the kid, who they name Adam (Brenden Fraiser, one of our most underrated actors).
Adam grows up happily in the shelter, genuinely loving his parents and developing a genius IQ, having little to do other than study. When the thirty five years finally end, Calvin visits the surface, which is now the ghetto, and thinks everyone is a mutant. He wants to spend another ten years in the shelter but Helen manages to convince him to allow Adam to go the surface and get supplies.
And one of the impressive about the movie is that's just the set-up. It took me about two paragraphs to describe it and the movie gets through it in about twenty minuets. The real heart (in more ways then one) of the film is when Adam shows up in L.A. circa 1999, disturbing everyone with his polite manners and excessive honesty. It's kind of like what happened when I met people from the punk community for the time. Anyway, the movie has a real sweetness to it that reminded me of some of the great comedies of the 80's. As Adam tries to use money, ride a bus, and "get a wife" we really like him, which make the movie end up as more than most comedies of the period which resorted to bodily function jokes. This is a movie that makes us think that, even though there was necessary cultural innovations brought by the 60's counterculture, a degree of civility and politeness was lost.
With a great cast, genuinely funny dialogue and an interesting message, this is one of the most overlooked films of the late 90's.
Blast from the Past (1999)