The Rapture (1991) goes where very few Hollywood movies have gone, taking on with dead seriousness the questions of morality, human fulfillment, and fundamentalist Christian beliefs concerning redemption and eternal life. Mimi Rogers plays an information operator who is so bored with her job that she indiscriminately picks up men, women, or couples every night to add a new bang or three to her sex life. After a fling with a former born-again tattooed lady, she begins to think that there must be something more to life.

Mimi eventually finds Jesus, marries a fellow Christian, and has a child. Everything is fine until her husband is violently murdered, and she begins to fanatically search for affirmation that God will also soon take she and her daughter to heaven, to blissfully rejoin Hubby. The rest of the movie is a surreal trip all the way to the second coming, featuring the rapture (all true believers in Jesus are whisked away to paradise), the horsemen of the apocalypse, and an incredible downer of an ending. Along the way, writer/director Michael Tolkin crosses a few lines that will disturb both believers and non-believers.

In 1989 director Steve DeJarnatt turned down millions of dollars from Warner Brothers so that he could make his apocalyptic film, Miracle Mile, exactly the way had written it. The big studio wanted him to happify the ending, making us think that it was all a dream.

Meek trombone player Harry (Anthony Edwards) falls instantly in love with Julie (Mare Winnigham) and sets up a late night-meeting at a diner where she works. Harry inadvertently answers a wrong number on the pay-phone outside the restaurant. On the other end of the line is a panic-stricken young man stationed at a missile silo trying to warn his dad that nuclear overkill is about to begin--"we shoot our wad in fifty minutes!" For the next hour Harry tries to find Julie and escape the holocaust as the entire city of Los Angeles erupts in looting, rioting, and weirdos. Savagely funny and depressing, Miracle Mile features a Tangerine Dream score and paired up Winingham and Edwards years before her appearance as his stalker on E.R.