Event

THE LAST DAYS OF PLANET EARTH

(aka CATASTROPHE 999)
Dir. Toshua Masuda, 1975/1999
Japan. 87 mins.
In crudely dubbed English.

Irwin Allen could only wish his name were attached to a spectacle as merciless and disgusting as THE LAST DAYS OF PLANET EARTH (also known as THE LAST DAYS OF MAN ON EARTH.) But the cataclysm is on both sides of the screen: LAST DAYS is a gone-atomic re-edit of the far superior psych-out shockumentary PROPHECIES OF NOSTRADAMUS, threaded through with painfully overdubbed English dialogue. (In total, there are six versions of the film in question - including a re-edit undertaken by the producers after the Japanese moviegoing public took outrage at the original, with special effects supervised by Yoshimitsu Banno, director of all-time Spectacle favorite GODZILLA VS. THE SMOG MONSTER.)

You already know the story: man's stupidity and hubris have dried out the world's food supply, his addiction to capitalism has ruined the ecosphere forever, and his naive nuclear experimentation has created blood-drinking leeches and bats - spurring a colony of mutants to take hold of a tropical island in New Guinea, before turning on one another and going full-cannibal. Set pieces include a traffic jam-cum-firestorm that puts DEEP IMPACT to shame, entire cities wiped out like so much fiberglass and tinsel, and a suicide cult throwing themselves into the ocean at the dawn of a new millennium. Even though 1999 has come and gone, LAST DAYS is essential viewing for these end-times, an appropriately brain-numbing, apocalyptic remix that can only be called insane (in the film grain).