Enjoy this Monday with Mildred!

Ever Since the World Ended

The title should give you a clue about how good a movie this is.  Could there be a more clunky title?  Sounds like the title of a second grader’s paper at the beginning of the school year.

A long, long…long time ago I watched Roger Corman’s The Day the World Ended, and of course because I was a kid I thought it was a hoot and great fun – and it scared me half to denyway, I chose Ever Since as something I could watch over the course of a couple of mornings, hoping for a pleasant surprise at least as good as Corman’s classic tale of a nuclear holocaust, a mutant gang of misfits, and a mutant.

Instead I got a trite and not well thought out tale set in San Francisco of a bunch of new wave survivalists who survive The Plague and then have group sessions on whether it’s nice or not nice to kick out a guy who tried to burn down the town after freaking out over the world ending.  *sigh*  Everything in the film is like that –  just off a little.  For instance, and this really bugged me, after ten years where is the litter?  You know, like tree leaves and rain runoff and animal remains or even the traditional newspapers blowing down the street?  Why is everyone still wearing new clothes?  Why do I want to laugh at the (director wants us to think is) butch guy sucking on a cigarette (where are they still making those in ten years? and if it’s
ten years old…ewww) as he sits working in his shop-full-o-tools?  How can these kids go foraging in houses and apartments that have been closed for ten years and not see piles of mouse nests (made of ripped up books, duvets, throw pillows) and doorways full of cobwebs?

The cleanliness and lack of set decoration put me in mind of homes people rent out to porn movie makers, in that I assume the contract these actors signed had a stipulation that their part would be filmed in their living room.

The big news in this movie is that the scariest thing in the world is the humans who inhabit it.  *sigh again*  And do we trust these pretty guys to give us hunting tips (“follow the dog packs” – Really?  Seriously?).

The good part, though, is that I could fast forward through the multitudes of talking heads (the film is about the making of a documentary…on FILM, so you know it’s IMPORTANT) and get through it in one morning.

LINKS:

• Ever Since the World Ended (IMDB)