It's the end of the world, and Christopher Lee is not happy.
Filmmaker Charles Band had sent three movies out into the world (Mansion of the Doomed, Crash!, and Cinderella) thanks to a distribution deal with a company called Group 1... but even though the movies made money, Band didn’t see a dime of it. When his friend John Carpenter heard that he was having distribution issues, he recommended that Band get in contact with Irwin Yablans, who had just formed a company called Compass International Pictures with Joe and David Wolf – a company that is best remembered for releasing Carpenter’s slasher classic Halloween in 1978.
Yablans agreed to release Band’s next project, a sci-fi horror film called End of the World, in the United States, while Manson International Pictures signed on to handle international distribution. Through those deals, Band was able to get End of the World into production with a small budget and a shooting schedule of approximately six days, during which most of the filming was done across just two weekends. Frank Ray Perilli, who had written everything Band had made that point except for Crash! (but including the disastrous spoof Last Foxtrot in Burbank), wrote the script, and John Hayes, who had gone from earning an Academy Award nomination for his 1959 short film The Kiss to directing a stream of exploitation films, was brought in to take the helm.
Yablans requested that Band get a familiar name into the movie... so if you ever hear anything about End of the World, you’ll probably hear that genre movie legend Christopher Lee felt that he was hoodwinked into appearing in the movie, even though he was paid something around $50,000 (one-third of the entire budget) for it. Lee would say that the producer told him he’d be sharing the screen with the likes of Arthur Kennedy, Richard Basehart, José Ferrer, John Carradine, and Dean Jagger if he took a job on this production – but while Basehart, Ferrer, and Carradine had worked with Band on previous projects, they were nowhere to be found on the set of End of the World. The only actor on that list to appear in End of the World is Dean Jagger, which wasn’t enough for Lee’s liking.
Lee takes on the role of Father Pergado, the head of a convent. The opening sequence sees a frightened Pergado seeking help at a diner. The owner (Simmy Bow) is open to helping him, but before he can things go haywire in the place and the owner ends up dead, smashed through a window. Pergado exits the diner, walking through the dark night and returning to the convent, where he’s greeted by... himself. Actually, it’s an alien called Zindar, who has stolen his appearance. This is the most interesting scene in the movie, and it will never again get even close to being this interesting.
End of the World moves along at a crawl, with nothing much ever happening. Even Band has described this as “the worst” and “a sleeping pill” of a movie. Kirk Scott plays NASA Professor Andrew Boran, whose computer has been picking up strange, coded signals that are being sent back and forth between space and a point somewhere on Earth. Boran eventually comes to realize that these are messages that are talking about natural disasters that are about to start occurring around the world. We hear about these disasters, but there wasn’t enough of a budget for us to see these disasters.
With the help of his wife Sylvia (Sue Lyon), Boran discovers that the source of the messages sent from Earth is the convent headed up by Father Pergado, now a.k.a. Zindar. The nuns in the place have also been replaced by aliens who are plotting with Zindar to destroy the Earth before its diseases contaminate the universe beyond repair. Once they know what’s going on and escape attempts have failed, Andrew and Sylvia decide, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” With a fairly nonchalant attitude, they give up on the dying planet and head off to the Utopian world the aliens came from.
End of the World is true to its title – and, thanks to some stock footage, the film does show some of the destruction being caused around the planet in its final moments.
It’s usually not a good sign when not even a film’s producer thinks it’s any good, and such is the case with End of the World. Aside from the presence of a disappointed Christopher Lee, there’s not much to make this one worth watching.
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