In the mid-60's notoriously ill-regarded Grade Z exploitation feature hack Larry Buchanan made a handful of uniformly awful films -- "The Eye Creatures," "It's Alive," and this thuddingly dismal dud among 'em -- under the auspices of the legendary B-movie grindhouse studio American International Pictures. These flicks were so bad that AIP deemed them unworthy of theatrical releases and instead tossed them away as strictly direct-to-television fare, where these clinkers have since become firmly established as perennial late night cathode ray timekiller fodder.
This is Larry's typically lousy $1.98 remake of Roger Corman's admittedly cheap, but still hugely enjoyable sci-fi doomsday classic "The Day the World Ended." The basic premise remains the same: A motley assortment of people who are unscathed by a lethal nuclear blast hole up in a remote mountainside redoubt run by a hard-nosed survivalist. They quarrel and squabble with each other until a disfigured telepathic cannibal mutant finally attacks the shelter in the last reel. Harold Hoffman's drab, talky, studiously by-the-numbers trite script doesn't offer any fresh, compelling imaginative twists on the original, thus relegating this turkey to tepid Rehash City Snoozeville from cruddy start to dreary end. Moreover, Buchanan's lifeless direction fails abysmally to create either tension or momentum, allowing a stultifying surplus of tedious talk to bring the already leaden pace to a grindingly torpid snail-like clip. Robert C. Jessup's ratty, all-beat-to-unsightly-hell cinematography, the watery, tunelessly droning stock film library score, dreadfully unconvincing make-up (the mutant looks like some wizened old guy with a severe sunburn and a glowing white fright wig), an irritatingly preachy and heavy-handed Christian morality, and the largely wooden acting (only the always dependable Bill Thurman as a crusty old alcoholic rancher adds any much-needed vitality to the staggeringly static proceedings) certainly don't help matters any as well. Overall, this insufferably atrocious wash-out sadly rates as one of the all-time worst and most dissatisfying end-of-the-world sci-fi losers to ever limp its crappy way onto celluloid.
This is Larry's typically lousy $1.98 remake of Roger Corman's admittedly cheap, but still hugely enjoyable sci-fi doomsday classic "The Day the World Ended." The basic premise remains the same: A motley assortment of people who are unscathed by a lethal nuclear blast hole up in a remote mountainside redoubt run by a hard-nosed survivalist. They quarrel and squabble with each other until a disfigured telepathic cannibal mutant finally attacks the shelter in the last reel. Harold Hoffman's drab, talky, studiously by-the-numbers trite script doesn't offer any fresh, compelling imaginative twists on the original, thus relegating this turkey to tepid Rehash City Snoozeville from cruddy start to dreary end. Moreover, Buchanan's lifeless direction fails abysmally to create either tension or momentum, allowing a stultifying surplus of tedious talk to bring the already leaden pace to a grindingly torpid snail-like clip. Robert C. Jessup's ratty, all-beat-to-unsightly-hell cinematography, the watery, tunelessly droning stock film library score, dreadfully unconvincing make-up (the mutant looks like some wizened old guy with a severe sunburn and a glowing white fright wig), an irritatingly preachy and heavy-handed Christian morality, and the largely wooden acting (only the always dependable Bill Thurman as a crusty old alcoholic rancher adds any much-needed vitality to the staggeringly static proceedings) certainly don't help matters any as well. Overall, this insufferably atrocious wash-out sadly rates as one of the all-time worst and most dissatisfying end-of-the-world sci-fi losers to ever limp its crappy way onto celluloid.