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"Our story begins with... THE END!" Archival footage of nuclear blasts announces the apocalypse, Cadillac and burro follow the trail to a valley ranch in a terse passage with consequences for Losey (These Are the Damned). The survivors gather in the living room, comedy/tragedy masks prominently featured on the wall: A sea captain with Noah delusions (Paul Birch), his daughter (Lori Nelson), a geologist (Richard Denning), a gangland wiseguy (Mike "Touch" Connors) and his brassy moll (Adele Jergens), a craggy prospector (Raymond Hatton) and a radium-fried fellow (Paul Dubov). Nature's devastation is illustrated with childlike drawings of mutated rats and hounds, then made flesh (and rubber) in the triclops prowling outside, a gorilla-sized gremlin with floppy horns and woeful peepers. Poisoned meat and acid rain, "there's no such thing as logic anymore." A warped version of evolution marches on regardless, there are "wonderful things happening," you just have to leave the house and venture beyond the hills. Roger Corman sketches all of this absorbingly as a noir chamber piece and Old Testament parable, scored to radio static, Geiger counter squeaks, and the sultry jazz echoes to which the stripper showcases her art. Ten Little Indians is briefly mentioned, Key Largo is visible throughout. Humanity on the verge and cinema on the margins, a persistent theme (Teenage Caveman, Last Woman on Earth). An angry work and a humanistic one, with the specter of war arising from its shoestring Guernica effects along with the necessity of new beginnings. "You know, I think I'm starting to want to live again." The last image is from Lang's Der Müde Tod, expanded in Kurosawa's "The Weeping Demon" (Dreams). With Jonathan Haze and Paul Blaisdell. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |