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"What hit you?" "The end of the world, Mr. Gern." The credits printed on a nude female form segue into a cockfight, thus Eve and the chumps and the Second Coming. The businessman (Anthony Carbone) in Puerto Rico with trophy wife (Betsy Jones-Moreland) and hostile lawyer (Robert Towne), sharp little scenes looking back at Out of the Past and, as the three go boating, ahead to Knife in the Water (vide the husband's complacent pipe-puffing and gadget-tinkering). Canny existentialist that he is, Roger Corman unleashes a most thrifty apocalypse onto the tropical resort: "Something took the oxygen out of the air... and now it's back!" Dodging stingrays when humanity got asphyxiated, the characters find themselves alone in the island—quick sketches of deserted streets and unmanned cars give the aftermath, then off to an isolated beachfront villa for tensions to simmer and spill over. An earful of Lewis Carroll in the midst of the macho competition ("always a game"), one is an embodiment of Fifties entitlement and the other is a budding nihilist voiced by the future author of Chinatown: "All that's left for us is to live with our pain." (More Towneisms: "I've so little to say and no one who'll listen ... I didn't make my money in one day. You lost it in twenty minutes.") Removing the monster from this Day the World Ended recomposition to crystallize the absurdist view of human relations, Corman summons up an absolute abyss out of palm trees and nondescript living rooms. The tussle moves from cliffside ruins to hollowed-out church, the capper sets the tone for the self-inquiring decade that followed. "Let's go home." "Where's that?" In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |