The Late Great Planet Earth

Internet Explorer crashed just after I typed a large review comment, and I'm not about to enter it again. Suffice to say that these guys claim to know about the Bible and they do not. Their views are either uninformed or narrow. See the movie yourself and review it on its own merits, not on whether it matches your own set of beliefs.

I was a theatre manager when this tripe was released and audiences laughed out loud at the absurd theories and assumptions.

Along with it's equally funny partner CHARIOTS OF THE GODS?, LATE GREAT asks ridiculous questions and then presents lame answers.

This movie could have become a cult film had the "take the money and run" type distribution failed. It is that silly.

A relative of the old sex education sensational films that promised everything, both LATE GREAT and CHARIOTS had massive TV campaigns and suckered large crowds for a week or two, then disappeared taking all the prints on to the next town.

Was Satan's ambassador to earth really Gerald Ford? Probably not. Are we really nearing the end of civilisation? No, movies like this one stopped being made. Does the bible predict the future? No, that would be STAR TREK. The bible is about the past.

The book on which this film is based is a fine COLD WAR era interpretation of revelation. Written in a era when NATO and the WARSAW PACT treaty nations trembled at the prospect of conventional and nuclear conflict; now that the mind numbing smog of hatred and fear is being blown out, this film needs to be re-written. Lindsey's approach caters to the right wing heavily. Many people have flocked to go see this film or read the accompanying book;or both! This film and films like them are from dime a dozen fear merchants who prey on the minds of the peaceful with a dogma of troop deployments to har meggido, marks on right hands or foreheads,and the U.S. government turning evil. The problem with this film is it is dated badly. Lindsy has since moved away from doing videos and has turned to a weekly current events right wing TV show on TBN. If the U.S. government wanted to do some good why not produce films like this one to offset the work of the fear feeding vampires in the Christian media world.

"The Late Great Planet Earth" is narrated by the late great Orson Welles. The film is a pseudo-documentary that purports to portray the events which lead to the rapture, as described in the book of Revelations, according to the deluded minds of evangelical Christian (kooks),Hal Lindsey and CC Carlson- who wrote a book of the same name.

The film blends documentary and stock footage, with interviews and fictional (well...biblical) re-enactments. The purpose of this loony Christian propaganda piece is basically to argue that the "prophecies" contained in the book of Revelations- discussing the lead up to the rapture- were being fulfilled by world events in the late 1970s.

The collection of people who participated in this film are, to say the least, odd- from Welles, to Noble Prize winners, to Physicists- a seriously weird array of characters, which might lead you to believe the whole project was actually undertaken as a joke. Cause if they were serious?...that's pretty sad.

5 out of 10.

The simplest way to tell if you'll enjoy this movie is to read the other reviews here and see the type of person drawn to comment on it.

That is if you can actually interpret(and stomach) the ramblings.

In reality, it sums up nicely the 'Age Of Aquarius' paranoia so rampant in the '70s, a decade where lifelong borderline personality disorders could be mistaken for immediate divine insight. And its this very outlook which dates it so badly.

If you keep an open mind, it can be amusing in a certain way. I saw it, for instance, shortly before the 1st Gulf War, and wondered how many people watching it on late night cable TV believed they had found the reason for, and ultimate outcome of, the approaching conflict.

But reality prevailed-it has a nasty habit of doing that..

Definitive proof that people will take meaning from just about anything. Even worse, proof that poor Orson sadly outlived his talent, reduced to shoddy documentaries like this to keep him in cigars.

Kane would Weep!