END OF THE WORLD

 

One thing about being a Christopher Lee fan is that you can never run out of titles in which to watch him perform. END OF THE WORLD is a 1977 science fiction story, produced in the USA by Charles Band, which I recently acquired on DVD (at a cheap price of course). 

1977 saw the release of STAR WARS, which featured Christopher Lee's close friend and frequent co-star Peter Cushing. As for Lee, 1977 saw him appearing in END OF THE WORLD and STARSHIP INVASIONS, a couple of sci-fi flicks that are at a far lesser level than George Lucas' blockbuster. END OF THE WORLD has Lee playing two roles--a priest named Father Pergado and his alien clone. 

The movie starts out with plenty of bangs, as a dazed Father Pergado stumbles into a diner late at night, and asks to use the telephone to call the authorities. Before the priest can contact anyone, things start exploding all over the diner, and the man working the counter is killed. Father Pergado returns to his convent, where he is welcomed by his exact double. 

After this promising opening, the story slows down to a crawl, as it follows a NASA scientist named Andrew Boran (Kirk Scott) who is puzzled by a number of strange signals he has been monitoring from space. While Boran and his wife Sylvia (Sue Lyon) go out on a lecture tour, they investigate the signals, which lead them to the convent where Father Pergado resides. The Borans learn that the priest and the nuns of the convent have all been duplicated by aliens, and these beings need to fix their time/space portal in order to get back to their native planet. Andrew just so happens to be working with a device called a "Variance crystal"--the exact type of device the aliens need, so they force the scientist to bring it to them. There's another major reason the aliens want to get away from Earth--a number of ecological disasters have been triggered, which will lead to the planet's destruction. 

Christopher Lee is the major reason to watch END OF THE WORLD, but he isn't in it enough. Much of the running time of the film is taken up with Kirk Scott and Sue Lyon (who played the title role in Kubrick's LOLITA) going from one place to another, and the duo are not very interesting. (If this film were made in the 1950s, the lead couple would have been played by the likes of Jeff Morrow and Mara Corday--and they would have been a lot more entertaining to watch.) The movie's ultra-low budget probably wouldn't have been enough for a major TV network program made during the same period, and it's saddled by one of the most annoying music scores I've ever heard. 

The cheap production values account for the plot's inconsistencies. The fake Father and his coterie of nuns have all sorts of super powers, but they can't venture anywhere away from the convent. The disasters befalling Earth are presented through stock footage from other films. There are cameos from veteran actors such as Lew Ayres, Dean Jagger, and Macdonald Carey, but they don't really add anything to the story, other than pad the running time. (In his biography of Lee, Jonathan Rigby quotes the actor as saying he agreed to be in the project due to the fact that he was told the likes of Arthur Kennedy, Jose Ferrer, and John Carradine were going to be in the picture. Even if they had been, it's doubtful Lee would have had scenes with them, since he doesn't share the screen with any of the guest stars who were actually in it.) 

Lee had just played a dangerous priest in TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER, and despite the bargain basement aspects of the production, he's still able to give the alien Pergado an eerie presence. As the results of the fake Pergado's powers are shown on screen, a close-up of Lee's eyes is superimposed.....a device that recalls scenes from the actor's Dracula films, and goes all the way back to Bela Lugosi. The creepiest thing in the movie other than Lee is the group of cloned nuns, a dour-looking handful of middle-aged women who might bring up bad memories for those who attended Catholic schools. 

END OF THE WORLD does have an unusual climax, which one could say is either a clever deviation from how one would expect the movie to end, or just a cheap way to wrap things up. The ending doesn't have the impact it should have because one never feels the entire world is at risk, only a very, very small part of it. 

One thing about the DVD I purchased--the disc case states that the version used comes from a 16mm remastered print, but the sound and picture quality are mediocre. END OF THE WORLD is another of a long line of features that didn't deserve (or make the best use of) the talents of Christopher Lee.