You can put all of the so-called masters of horror in one room, give them a $50 million budget and they still couldn’t come up with anything as effectively unsettling and downright creepy as a 1970s TV movie-of-the-week made by any random journeyman hack.

An absolute perfect storm of high concepts and low budgets, cheap film stock and sparse locations, overemotive acting and rushed finales, 1974’s Where Have All the People Gone — not based on the Peter, Paul and Mary flowers song, sadly — stars the eternally cloud-crowned Peter Graves (Airplane!) as an exceedingly levelheaded father who finds himself and his two grown kids in the middle of the cheapest apocalypse ever.

While spelunking as part of a family vacation — yep, they are those types of white people — a massive solar flare blasts the earth, causing Styrofoam rocks to bounce all over scenic Southern California and, in a startling turn of events, unleashing some sort of nonsensical virus that transmogrifies living people into decidedly non-living piles of clothes and dust. (I guess that plot point saved them a few dollars on mannequin rentals.)

As Graves’ patriarch admirably keeps it together, the only mission impossible here is trying to keep his two grating adult kids (The Evil’s George O’Hanlon Jr. and Event Horizon’s Kathleen Quinlan) from constantly suffering histrionically emotional breakdowns every time they see something that reminds them of their mom back in Malibu. With seemingly no automobiles working, he and his crew fashion a horse-and-buggy apparatus, pick up a catatonic mom and an orphaned rascal named Billy, search for groceries and fight packs of wild dogs on their way to the ’Bu, with predictably dystopian ’70s made-for-TV movie results.

From Circus of Fear director John Llewellyn Moxey — who I am willing to bet wore an ascot during production — this no-budget speculative thriller is surprisingly effective, considering it is honestly just a camera following a group of actors on a hike for an hour and 10 minutes, stopping every once and while to relay some sort of flimsy scientific theories about what’s going on, the unnatural sunshine beating down and emphasizing the desolation decently enough.

Featuring an open ending where most things are cleared up by Quinlan voice-overing about what mysteries the future might hold, this, like nearly all ’70s made-for-TV movies, felt like a pilot for a show that was never meant to be — something that probably would have been Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with a wardrobe furnished by the good people at Sears. —Louis Fowler

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Last October, Houston Rockets point guard Bobby Brown came under fire for signing his name and jersey number on the Great Wall of China. In the department of shame, however, Brown’s thoughtless and egotistical act of vandalism pales next to the wrongheaded disaster that is The Great Wall, an epic fantasy from House of Flying Daggers auteur Zhang Yimou.

Bearing for-the-ages bad hair, Matt Damon (Jason Bourne) and Pedro Pascal (TV’s Narcos) portray William and Tovar, a couple of non-Chinese mercenaries in China, looking to finagle some newfangled “black powder.” Being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the pair is imprisoned by the intimidating-sounding The Order and assumed to be not long for this world … until William’s ace archery skills strike The Order as a damn good defense against the Tao Tei.

Ah, yes, the Tao Tei: those giant, reptilian creatures that try to bust through the Great Wall (hence, the title) once every six decades. Victorious or not, at least the monsters exhibit impeccable attendance. Damon’s vaguely Irish bow-and-arrow beefcake joins an acrobatic female commander (the ever-flipping Jing Tian, Police Story: Lockdown) and other bugaboo crushers on the kind of multicultural crew that fronts so many of today’s global-minded blockbusters, from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the Magnificent Seven remake to each successive sequel in The Fast and the Furious franchise.

In all but the computer-generated threat, The Great Wall looks, well, great. But as in real life, looks aren’t everything, and indeed, this cruel mistress bores. In their color-coded armor, our heroes resemble comic-book warriors who have burst from page to screen, but Yimou has stuck them into a rote screenplay that reminded me of Reign of Fire — not a positive comparison, considering that 2002 dragon-festooned film is one of the few times I’ve exited the theater mid-movie.

Closer to Yimou’s home turf, it also brought to mind the high-flying fantasies of Tsui Hark, who rose to world-cinema fame on the strength of mystical martial-arts adventures like 1983’s Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain … and then missed as often as he hit. Although Yimou’s filmography is roughly half the size of Hark’s, a more definitive through line exists in Yimou’s work; whether Raise the Red Lantern, Curse of the Golden Flower or Jet Li’s Hero, he tends to stick within his comfort zone of costumed epics, more or less grounded in realism. The Great Wall retains the man’s hallmarks — an air of elegance, fluidity of movement, a love of the historical, elaborate robing as vital as weaponry — yet in poking a hole through the arthouse to get a glimpse of the more commercial fare playing next door, his hold on mastery falls to the floor. —Rod Lott

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