At the LA Times, Susan King offers a short review of a classic sci-fi sleeper:

It’s a wonder that baby boomers don’t have constant nightmares after growing up in the 1960s. Every day, you didn’t know whether the world was coming to an end. Growing up in Miami during the Cuban missile crisis, I lived in constant fear thanks to the classroom drills that sent us under our desks with images of mushroom clouds in our heads.
Then there were all those doomsday movies such as Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove where error or insanity sent the missiles flying. And the end-of-the-world fantasies went beyond the geopolitical themes with fare such as 1965’s Crack in the World, whose DVD debut hit stores just this week.

TCM’s Movie Morlocks weigh in, as well—and once again prove how infinitely adaptable Freud’s theories are:

This is just a neat movie. Although the film wasn’t intended for children, CRACK IN THE WORLD has everything a kid wants. It has Walkie Talkies and binoculars and Jeeps and helicopters and trains and laboratories full of gauges and dials and beakers full of colorful liquids, it has warheads and flame retardant suits and explosions and lava and just everything. Everybody in the movie works hard and is smart and good at what they do and when they die horrifically, as some do, them’s the breaks and not some snarky comment by the filmmakers that, really, they had it coming (you know, like the lawyer in JURASSIC PARK [1993]).
There’s something abjectly Freudian about the desperation of Sorenson, who is not only terminally ill but has been (we are encouraged to infer) rendered impotent by radiation treatment, to penetrate the earth’s crust because he [can’t] penetrate his wife.

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Resources:

LA Times review.

Films available at Amazon.com: Fail Safe – Dr. Strangelove – Crack in the World – Jurassic Park.

Movie Morlocks article.

—Mike Gray