End of the World (1977)

 

An early production from Charles Band, End of the World (1977) gets off to an intriguing start, with Christopher Lee's confused priest Father Pergado wandering into a roadside diner mumbling about having to use the phone and warn people.  Unfortunately, not only does the pay phone explode, but so does the coffee machine, blowing the proprietor through the window.  The priest wanders back to the nunnery where he is apparently staying, only to be greeted by his double.  Which sounds as if it is the set up for what is going to be an interesting story, possibly supernatural bearing in mind the priest, his doppelganger and the title, with the promise of dark mysteries to be unraveled.  Unfortunately though, it quickly becomes apparent that these opening five minutes are just about the most interesting part of the movie, as it quickly settles into to being a slow moving investigation by a NASA scientist into what might be signals from outer space apparently predicting natural disasters.  After what seems an age and various red herrings, the scientist and his wife finally end up at that nunnery, which not only seems to be the target of the signals, but is also emanating signals itself.  It transpires that the nuns and the duplicate Christopher Lee are actually aliens who have stolen the identities of the real nuns and priest as they try to repair their space warp apparatus they have hidden in the basement.  They need to return to their planet as soon as possible as the earth, it seems, is about to destroy itself.  Of course, repairing it requires the acquisition of a crystal that the scientist just happens to have been working on at his lab and he is coerced into stealing it for the aliens.

All of which sounds as if it should be exciting and interesting.  In the execution of the plot, however, it feels as if barely anything ever happens for long stretches.  Sure, it constantly looks as if something might be about to happen - people get into cars and drive places, pages are urgently torn from teletypes, characters walk pat rocket boosters being constructed and so on - but these scenes inevitably seem to resolve themselves into yet another talky scene between two people,  Part way through, it looks as if something exciting which will progress the plot really is happening, when the scientist and his wife are wandering around an apparently abandoned and remote site, which might have been the target of the signals, at night.  For an instant it seems that they are being stalked by someone or something and they are briefly separated, before being confronted by armed men and taken to an underground complex.  But it turns out that this is a government listening station and that the scientist knows the base commander - so they end up, again, just talking and not advancing the plot at all.  While the sequence does generate some tension, it is mainly shot in pitch black, so the viewer has little idea as to what is actually going on.  It does pick up a bit when they are finally captured by the alien nuns, but even this situation proves to be relatively uneventful, dominated by the alien Father Pergado sort of explaining the plot to them and punctuated by the real Father Pergado perishing as a test subject in the still malfunctioning space warp, (the aliens have been using the real nuns as test subjects, with universally fatal results).  An escape attempt by the couple comes to nothing, except for the death of a motorist who they try to hitch a lift from, when his car explodes.  Even the scientist's raid on his own lab to get the crystal, resulting in several explosions and confrontations with security guards, is far too small scale to generate much in the way of excitement.

 It isn't as if John Hayes' direction is bad - he, after all, had a solid career in exploitation, directing a couple of cult favourites in Grave of the Vampire (1972) and Mama's Dirty Girls (1974) - with well composed shots and uses interesting setting, such as the rocket plant, to provide an interesting background to what would otherwise be static dialogue scenes.  Indeed, for a lot of the film's running time, his choice of locations helps disguise the production's woefully small budget: it is only in the when we get to see the alien base that the movie's cheapness becomes painfully obvious.  The fact that the aliens use a space warp - which looks like a flimsy plywood arch - rather than a flying saucer to travel to and from earth is the biggest giveaway.  That and the fact that all the natural disasters we keep hearing about are only ever represented by stock footage - usually seen via TV monitors rather than being experienced first hand by any of the characters.  While the low budget is doubtless part of the reason for the film's preference for talk over action, the ultimate fault lies with a script which seems to have started with an eye-catching title and an idea for a cataclysmic finale, but had no idea where to go with the concept. It's biggest problem is that never really manages to properly link up all of its ideas - it is never clear whether the aliens are actually causing the natural disasters which will culminate in the world's end, or whether they are a natural result of the 'diseased' state of the earth described by their leader.  Certainly, the fact they can apparently bring remote destruction down upon anyone trying to help first Pergado, then the scientist and his wife, implies that they have the capability.  Now, I'm very much in favour of movies that don't serve everything up to the audience on a plate and instead assume that they are smart enough to put the pieces together themselves, but it still helps to be given some clues.  The script of End of the World seems simply confused and vague on this and other issues, as if the writer himself either couldn't make up his mind, didn't know or just didn't care.

The same seems to be trues of the characterisation of the aliens.  On the one hand, their leader keeps extolling their virtues as basically peace loving and emphasising how their own planet is a utopia, without death and disease.  Yet, simultaneously, they are happily killing anyone who gets in the way of their scheme and sacrificing peace-loving nuns and a priest as experimental subjects.  Not to forget that they think that the earth is emanating dangerous 'disease' into the cosmos, threatening its existence, (another point that is never fully explained or explored, instead just thrown away in a line of dialogue), and may, or may not, be involved in destroying the planet and the entire human race with it.  Again, there's a chance that this might be intentional: an attempt to establish their, well, 'alienness' through their apparently contradictory nature, implying that they are beyond conventional human concepts of morality.  I strongly suspect, however, that it is simply another aspect of the script's vagueness and confusion.  To some extent the aliens feel like an afterthought and that perhaps, in an earlier draft of the script they were angels sent to 'cleanse' the earth of evil through fire and disaster (which would tie in with the nunnery setting, the apocalyptic events and their home being a heavenly-sounding utopia), but were changed to aliens when it became apparent that, in the wake of the success of Star Wars (1977), anything with a science fiction element could get financing.  

Still, the film isn't entirely bad.  As already noted, Hayes' direction is reasonably effective, at some points managing to create a sense of impending doom.  His use of TV and radio reports of real contemporary natural disasters playing in the background of many scenes, for instance, helps embed the action firmly in the real world of 1977, giving these scenes a sense of immediacy and urgency sadly absent from the script.  End of the World also boasts an above average cast for a B-movie, featuring not just Lee, but also Dean Jagger, Lew Ayres, McDonald Carey and sue Lyon, although, apart from Lee and Lyon, none of them play particularly significant roles.  Lee later claimed that he was only persuaded to do the movie because he had been assured by the producers that they had already secured the services of other name actors such as Richard Basehart, Jose Ferrer, John Carradine and Arthur Kennedy, none of whom actually appeared.  This was a common tactic (and probably still is) of producers trying to secure star names for dubious projects - most likely the other recognisable actors who did appear in End of the World were given the same false assurances as Lee had been.  At least the film lives up to its title: the world really does end at the climax, with the globe exploding after the scientist and his wife decide to accompany the aliens back to their planet.  But even that exploding globe (an effect re-used at the end of the 1982 compilation film The Best of Sex and Violence, (in which John Carradine did appear), along with a brief glimpse of the aliens' true appearance, isn't enough to save th efilm from being a dud.  As with too many low budget exploitation films, a promising scenario with some interesting ideas is fumbled in its execution through a combination of a low budget and poor script.  A missed opportunity on every level.