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Day the World Ended Director: Roger Corman
This is yer bog-standard Corman flick, with seven people left alive after a nuclear attack, surviving in a valley where the geography has somehow kept the clouds of radioactive death away. You’ve got Louise Maddison (Lori Nelson: Revenge of the Creature) and her father (Paul Birch: Not of This Earth, Queen of Outer Space, Beast with a Million Eyes) who have a house stocked with enough provisions for three people. But Louise’s boyfriend is not there and it looks like he didn’t make it to the valley in time (we see a photo of them together and, what do you know, he looks just like Roger Corman!). Instead they find five strangers on their doorstep, starting with violent hoodlum Tony (Mike ‘Touch’ Connors: Voodoo Woman, and later star of TV series Mannix) and his stripper girlfriend Ruby (Adele Jergens: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man). Not that I’m suggesting that Corman recycles his ideas - but these are exactly the same characters played by Jerry Trimble and Jeannie Millar forty years later in Mind Breakers! Whatever happens when the world goes kaput, the survivors will include a thug and a stripper. Next to turn up is handsome, kind Rick (Richard Denning: Creature from the Black Lagoon, Creature with the Atom Brain, The Black Scorpion) with an ill man he found on the hillside, Radek (Paul Dubov: The Atomic Submarine, Voodoo Woman, The She-Creature). Finally there’s old prospector Pete (Raymond Hatton, also in Invasion of the Saucer-Men and with a list of credits that goes back to 1912, including the Lon Chaney Hunchback and about 3,000 westerns!) with his mule Diabolo.
It turns out that Maddison was an observer during the USA’s Pacific A-bomb tests and has sketches of some mutated animals that resulted, including a scaly three-eyed monkey. Sure enough, it turns out that there are surviving mutants over the hill and we eventually get to see one. It’s a Paul Blaisdell creation which is the goofiest-looking damn thing you ever saw, with a conical head, three eyes, long pointy ears, wobbly horns and little vestigial extra arms sticking out of its shoulders. What is never made explicit - possibly because Corman wanted to be subtle but more likely because he couldn’t be bothered - is that this may actually be Louise’s missing boyfriend. She feels some connection to it and heard it call her name ... but that thread is never followed up. Corman regular Jonathan Haze (The Terror, Little Shop of Horrors) plays a nearly dead man in one scene and the book-ending narration is by NBC’s Chet Huntley (as in ‘Brinkley and...’). Lou Rusoff also wrote It Conquered the World (for Corman) and The She-Creature. Cinematographer J Arthur Feindel had actually been a cameraman on Supernatural and White Zombie!
Like the other titles, this is a full-frame transfer. Whereas that didn’t matter so much on Spider, Beast and Monster, Day the World Ended was shot in ‘Superscope’ and indeed the opening titles and the closing shot (which says ‘The Beginning’ and to be fair, that wasn’t a cliche in 1956) are letterboxed. Not only is a lot of the picture missing, but the print hasn’t even been panned and scanned - we just get the middle of the picture. So characters are frequently off-screen, even when they’re speaking. There’s one scene of the two women in their bedroom when all we see of either is an arm and a shoulder! Given the quality of the other films on offer and the effort that DVD has put into these releases - the Sam Arkoff audio interview and the postcards are still here - I’m surprised they’ve let themselves down with this one. My only consolation is that at least Day the World Ended was a pretty crappy film to start with. MJS rating: C- DVD: Amazon.com | ||
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