1970s SF film
Jun. 20th, 2010 07:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peteryoung
End of the World, 1977, USA DIRECTED BY JOHN HAYES
This wasn't Christopher Lee's least favourite film – that was Starship Invasions – but End of the World probably comes close: "Some of the films I've been in I regret making. I got conned into making these pictures in almost every case by people who lied to me. Some years ago, I got a call from my producers saying that they were sending me a script and that five very distinguished American actors were also going to be in the film. Actors like José Ferrer, Dean Jagger and John Carradine. So I thought, "Well, that's alright by me". But it turned out it was a complete lie. Appropriately the film was called End of the World." Having read this long before seeing the film I found myself already rather tilted against it, but the neat short section featuring Lee as a sinister priest before the opening credits roll left me thinking "Well, so far so good." That, however, turned out to be as far as my actual interest went as what comes after is almost unrelentingly dire, with a dull plot involving the discovery of messages from outer space, a strange Catholic convent in Los Angeles (complete with aliens disguised as nuns) and the eventual destruction of the planet all working itself out with tedious and highly predictable regularity. Some plot elements also reminded me of Roger Corman's Not of This Earth, and it shares with that movie a classically dreadful kind of skiffy dialogue: "The planet Earth has emitted an over-abundance of diseases, they are contaminating the universe. All the planets light years away from here will suffer unless it is destroyed!" The film tries so hard to exude class but fails at every scene as too little of any interest actually happens (and the first three minutes, post-title sequence, have the protagonist in his office surrounded by nothing more than computers that emit Star Trek sound effects). Too many scenes are so dark it's often hard to see what's going on, the ending leaves you completely deflated and Lee himself, bless him, is convincingly able to communicate to the viewer that he's utterly bored with it all. A contractual obligation movie for Lee, clearly, and he probably dearly wished he'd got the Star Wars gig that year instead of his mate Alec Guinness. Utterly pointless, one to avoid.
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Date: 2010-06-20 09:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-20 09:38 pm (UTC)