It was a scary place in a lot of American heads back then. Science, as always, was looked on suspiciously by most folks and during this time enormous steps forward were convincing not a few people that the “eggheads” were going to kill us all. At the same time, the Space Race that was also a part of the Cold War was testing people’s fear of the unknown, including worry about what the astronauts might inadvertently bring back to Earth. Fear of a nuclear holocaust was a real and constant tension, not helped by a growing public knowledge of just how sneaky governments – even ours – could be. and the Soviets had a lot of people on edge. Forty million people had died not thirty years before, leaving no one on the planet unaffected, and the covert and potentially world killing activities of the U.S. The Andromeda Strain appeared in the middle of the Cold War, which was the (mostly) non-shooting fallout of two surviving giants of World War II. After an examination of the town the action moves to a super-secret underground bio-research facility code named Wildfire (set in the middle of the nuclear testing area, now more popularly known at Area 51 – which you won’t find on Google Map). It got worse a few minutes later when we learned it’s a space bug that kills the town of Piedmont, New Mexico, which looks as arid as the surface of the Moon and which the government intends to sterilize with a nuclear bomb. The creepy began with an opening statement about the events being real and thanking the responsible government agency (fake) for their cooperation (the book even has fake bibliographic citations). Neither of us knew that the schlocky sci fi we expected would have us speechless in paranoid fear before very long. The Andromeda Strain is none of those things, but we thought it was when we turned the rabbit ears in the direction of that night’s film (yes, people, you couldn’t see movies every day on tv, and when you could there was only one movie, and only one time). I’ve loved movies for a very, very long time thanks to my dad, who shared my love of the bad, the cheesy, and the ridiculous. The filmmakers did NOT kill the monkey, so you can relax.
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