Created: 11/02/2009 3:05 PM KSTC45.com | Print Story By: ReelzChannel Staff

The 10 Most-Killer Ways to End the World

Will the world end in fire or in ice? And when it does, will the lowly cockroach inherit the earth? The end of days is one thing that Hollywood knows how to do really well — at least sometimes. With the apocalyptically themed 2012 in theaters next week, we thought it high time to take stock of the many tried-and-true horsemen of the apocalypse. It's against these titles that 2012's wrath shall be measured.

1.		Nuclear War A Cold War classic, the threat of nuclear annihilation remains as real as ever. Dr. Strangelove took the genre to the limit back in 1964 with Slim Pickings riding the bomb down to the end of the world with gleeful abandon. In line with the times, cinematic nuclear threats nowadays are more often an attempt to up the ante on a terrorist plot, rather than any serious attempt at ending the human race.
2.		Robots Malevolent robots are having a real go at finishing off the species lately, as the Terminator franchise digs deeper into exactly just how serious Skynet is about making sure no one is left alive. Nuclear holocaust is just the beginning. All sorts of new Terminator models, from the early T-series to deadly eel-bots, were unleashed on the survivors in Terminator Salvation.
3.		Monsters Wielding a death ray and stomping out legions of puny human opponents, the original Godzilla still holds the place of pride among giant monsters with world-wrecking ambitions. Reboots and imitations have not lived up to the original's promise, whether it be dragons or dinosaurs that have taken his place. The monster that appears to have really captured the 21st-century imagination is the zombie.
4.		Zombies The zombie movie database now lists an astounding 4,537 flesh-eating flicks since the release of George Romero's 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead. In their earlier incarnations, the slow-moving zombies had more-localized ambitions, content with eating the brains of a small town or shopping mall. Now that their numbers are legion, their appetites have grown as well. In a number of recent and planned releases, such as 28 Days Later and its sequel or World War Z, they have learned to sink their teeth into the global collapse of civilization. The advent of the faster Mark 2 zombies is really helping this one along.
5.		Plagues While cinematic plagues now frequently usher in the zombie hoards, superbugs remain a world-ending terror unto themselves. The Andromeda Strain played it first, but Twelve Monkeys ramped up the despair to new heights, sending Bruce Willis to the past on a doomed quest to stop the virus that sent humanity scuttling into the sewers.
6.		Climate/Natural Disasters While the return of the glaciers once held promise as an agent of doom, recent science points in the opposite direction. The most prominent of the climate disaster movies so far, The Day After Tomorrow seems to have missed the memo on that one, settling on instant ice and cool special effects instead. And the less said about Waterworld, the better. The latest addition to the genre, 2012 uses an ancient prophecy about the end of days as the premise for an onslaught of natural disasters. Thankfully, it promises to provide some humor mixed in with the cataclysmic events — Woody Harrelson did advance marketing for the movie as Charlie Frost, "Apocalypse Prognosticator."
7.		Cosmic Destruction All the rage a decade ago, death by asteroid seems to have been put on the back burners in Hollywood after a comet and "Texas-sized" space rock failed to completely do in the planet in the back-to-back thrillers Deep Impact and Armageddon. This year's Knowing brought the wrath of a massive solar flare. A more original but, alas, far less believable angle on death from above inspired 2007's Sunshine, which sped up the expected death of the sun by billions of years so we could appreciate the inevitable today, and try our hands at fixing it.
8.		Supernatural Intervention Back in the old days, visions of doomsday were primarily the province of religion. But Hollywood knows how to do it old school too, with the Antichrist, devils, demons, assorted angels, and even God Almighty variously conniving to bring an end to it all. The standout in this genre remains The Omen, with its demon child bending the world to his will to summon up a literal apocalypse. Honorable mention, though, should go to Christopher Walken's wicked performance as the angel Gabriel bent on rooting out the upstart humans in Prophecy.
9.		Alien Invasion From War of the Worlds to Mars Attacks!, unfriendly aliens have been setting the planet on fire to wipe out the competition. Independence Day raised the bar, though, by spectacularly disintegrating the White House and various whole cities with its apparently invincible space ships and directed-energy weapons.
10.		Bugs Bugs definitely up the ick factor on doomsday. Guillermo del Toro's Mimic out-creeps the competition here with intelligent, deadly, and well-camouflaged roach-like critters set to out-evolve humanity. And no matter how many times they are stomped out, insects come back — crawling, flying, and oozing their way onto the screen. Witness the bug-filled mayhem in the recent indie release Infestation.