Review: End of the World

Well, there’s a NASA communications guy (Kirk Scott) who discovers some strange transmissions. And uh, there’s a priest skulking about (Christopher Lee). And some natural disasters. There’s those too. As to the rest…I’ve got nothing. Sue Lyon plays Scott’s wife, Dean Jagger is a colleague, Macdonald Carey a security guard, and Lew Ayres plays some guy who is only in one scene and has little to do with anything.

 

When you work for as long and make as many films as Christopher Lee did in his prolific career, there’s gonna be some turds in there. Presenting this 1977 science-fiction snoozer from schlock filmmaker John Hayes (classy-sounding softcore ventures like “Heterosexualis” and “Jailbait Babysitter”), screenwriter Frank Ray Perilli (Michael Pataki’s softcore “Cinderella”, Albert Band’s awful “Zoltan – Hound of Dracula”, and the infamous “Laserblast”), and uber B-movie studio head/producer Charles Band (“Laserblast”, the watchable and cheesy “Puppet Master” series). According to his updated autobiography Lord of Misrule, the story goes that someone once again lied to the very dignified and classy Mr. Lee. It happened several times in his career, usually involving something like a Jesus Franco film where nudie things were going on around Lee that he supposedly wasn’t aware of until seeing the final product (Whether you choose to believe his naïve ignorance or not, is up to you. I’m unsure). Well, this time Lee didn’t find himself hoodwinked into appearing in a softcore horror flick. No, this time apparently he signed on because he was told he was going to be working on a film featuring actors like Jose Ferrer, Dean Jagger, and John Carradine. He felt lied to, though to be fair, at the very least Dean Jagger certainly appears in the film. I’m not going to personally point fingers squarely in anyone’s direction, but I will note that two of those three actors did appear in Band’s previous “Crash!” alongside Sue Lyon, who also appears in this film. Something’s obviously fishy. From what I can gather, the only other commonality between the two films behind the scenes, is producer-director Band himself, who to me has always seemed like a fairly affable successor to Roger Corman. Whatever happened and whoever was to blame, there’s one thing I can definitely agree with Mr. Lee on here: The film is utterly terrible, one of the worst films the great man has ever appeared in. However, I must say that it’s still better than “Police Academy: Mission to Moscow”.

 

Early on you know you’re watching a cheaper-than-usual product from Band, as it looks awful. Full Moon flicks, as schlocky and low-budget as they tended to be, at least had decent cinematography and handsome – if cheap – location shooting. This is shoddy as hell, including dreadful lighting and cinematography by John Huneck (“No Retreat, No Surrender”, “Martial Law”). I know the print I viewed was pretty dreadful, but still this is really murky. Rather than a Full Moon flick, it’s more reminiscent of something Edward D. Wood Jr. would churn out, ala “Plan 9 From Outer Space”. In fact, Lee’s first scene is so bad – and features unusually terrible work from the man – that it’s a bit reminiscent of the drug-addled Bela Lugosi being propped up in “Plan 9” for some hastily filmed line readings. I highly doubt this has as much re-watch value as that bad movie classic, however. Lee’s performance is otherwise OK, but still far from his best and you have to wait an awful long time for him to turn up again. Instead it’s mostly the deadly dull and nondescript Kirk Scott we’re force fed to endure. The more well-known Sue Lyon doesn’t look to be in the best of spirits, and is only marginally better than Scott. She was a great “Lolita”, but is surprisingly charmless and frumpy here. I think she might’ve actually been stoned or something during filming, though don’t quote me on that. Although he’s much better than Scott and Lyon, veteran character actor Dean Jagger looks and sometimes sounds in absolutely awful health. I wondered at times if he had suffered a minor stroke on set. Also, his first scene features so much noisy machinery in the background you can’t understand him. What shoddy filmmaking and sound design. MacDonald Carey was what I like to call the Gregory Peck of the TV world, and was blessed with one of the best speaking voices, as anyone who has watched even the opening credits of “Days of Our Lives” can attest. Sadly, he’s wasted here in a nothing part that he doesn’t bother to invest all that much in. I don’t blame him, he’s too good for this shit.

 

The first three-quarters of the film is a lot of skulking around in far too much darkness for no reason of interest, before Lee re-emerges at the climax. There things go a bit bonkers, but not in any entertaining way, and Lee (although better by this point) is still hampered by the shitty material he’s fed. He’s basically giving us that false geniality Lord Summerisle schtick, but in much, much lesser surrounds. How lesser? The apocalyptic finale uses a lot of cheap stock footage, for one thing. It looks like Band spent about $100 bucks on the entire film. $20 of which probably went on that dopey alien head towards the end. Class act or not, Lee can’t do much with the putrid dialogue or poorly executed plotting here. I’m still not sure what it was all about, and it’s a massive problem. Yes, there’s a few interesting classic sci-fi themes in here that I could pick up on (Alien invasion, cloning etc.), but it’s 20 minutes of story and 80 minutes of boring padding. I do love the idea of a sinister priest and his attack dog nuns though, it provides some very funny shit in an otherwise dry, enervated film.

 

No one behind the scenes here seems to have a clue how to pull off this sci-fi story off, as scientific terms are strung together without any idea what they mean by the screenwriter, let alone cast. No intelligence, ingenuity, energy, horror…there’s nothing except padding. A lot of padding, and a couple of unintentional laughs at the sinister nuns. It’s bad, it’s really bad, with a few recognisable names mostly phoning it in and probably embarrassed to have been wrangled into such a shoddy affair. Only a folksy Lew Ayres emerges completely unscathed, and he’s only in one very brief scene. Lots of bleeping and blooping outdated giant computer nonsense, and a whole lot of tedium. A shocker.

 

Rating: D-