The Day the World Ended

Dr. Jenniffer Stillman (the gorgeous Nastassja Kinski) is a school psychologist from N.Y. that moves to her new job in a small American town. There she will meet Benjamin James McCann (Bobby Edner), a boy with a powerful mind, and some strange citizens that live under the shadow of a mysterious event in the past. I am a great fan of those Universal Classic Monster movies from the 50's, such as 'The Creature from The Black Lagoon', 'The Wolf Man', 'Frankenstein', 'The Invisible Man' etc. 'The Day the World Ended' look like one of those movies from the 50's. It seems that the director and the screenplay writer wanted to honor those movies. Further, it could be used as a 'X-Files' episode. There are clichés, the special effects are very poor, but it has a charm. It is a Sci-Fi / Horror movie without explicit violence that entertains. It deserves to be watched. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "O Dia Que o Mundo Acabou" ("The Day the World Ended")

The world doesn't come anywhere near ending in this movie, which makes the title a mystery.

The kid who plays the young boy is appropriately creepy-looking, though. The monster? Well, it shuffles along making gooshy-slurpy noises. There are some big teeth in there somewhere, I think.

This is a lame movie, but what the hey -- I watched it all the way through anyway. Such is my unaccountable love for monster movies.

Preposterous sci-fi trash in which a little boy believes himself a son of an alien. Based on this account, he waits for his 'alien' father returns to bring him back for another planet. Suddenly, a strange creature appears at the little town where the boy lives with an adopted father and starts to kill the inhabitants. The premise of this misfire could have rendered an acceptable film but the final result is ridiculous, boring and unbelievable. Just Miss Kinsky is a delight to see. I give this a 03 (three).

Dr Jennifer Stillman is a child psychologist who moves to a small town for a break from the big city life. On her first day placed in the town's school, she notices a strange young boy called Ben. Taking the opportunity to dig a little deeper into the clearly troubled lad, she learns that he was adopted by his father (Michael) after his real mother died and nobody knew who his real father was. However she doesn't know quite what to think about Ben's belief that his father was an alien and that he will return one day; but when someone or something is killing people in the small town could it be that Ben is the only one that knows what is really going on?

With a relatively well-known cast and an appealing title, I decided to give this film a go but must admit that I didn't think it was that good – although maybe worth giving a go if you're in an undemanding mood. The plot offers mystery that appealed to me but it reveals its secrets very early on by revealing the rubbery beast quite early on in the proceedings. In fact it reveals so much early on that I realized that there must be more to the story than this, there must be some sort of twist and turn coming at the end or else this will have been one very dull movie. For what it's worth, there are some plot 'revelations' towards the end but they are not that good and they certainly don't make up for the rest of the film being a rather dull affair that occasionally throws in some rubbery effects. This part should create tension and mystery but it doesn't and the direction the plot takes comes across rather like a series of ideas that have been lifted from better films and not fully delivered here. It has some entertainment value but it would have worked better as a short film (30 minutes long) because here it feels rather stretched.

Edner was good as Ben, he wasn't as horribly cute as he could have been and he deals with the 'running and being scared' side of things just fine. Kinski overplays her part and makes it too earnest and serious. I'm not suggesting that she needed to be all-singing, all-dancing, but there is a difference between being convincingly earnest and coming across as really forcing the performance of being earnest – Kinski does the latter rather than the former and she didn't do anything for me at all. Quaid is his usual self and is a nice addition; he does well with what he is given to work with. Support is quite good from Tobolowsky, Groener and a few others but generally this film is not about the characters – it is about the plot and, in that regard, it isn't as satisfying as I had hoped it would be.

Overall this is watchable once but it is not much cop after that. The plot marks out its stall early on and tells us a lot but then settles on that for a while, making the majority of the film come across as a bit dull. When the twists and turns do come, they are a bit flat and uninspired and it never gets anywhere near the atmosphere that it wants to have and it doesn't really work on any level. Maybe genre fans will like it but I can find little to recommend it for and would advise that there are better films with similar ideas which develop and deliver them much better than this below-average made-for-television effort.

There are some noteworthy names and familiar faces involved here, not least effects maestro Stan Winston. While Terence Gross isn't otherwise known to me, I did quite enjoy his 2000 feature 'Hotel Splendide,' which boasted outstanding, fanciful aesthetics and dark humor. How might all these folks and the anticipated creature effects fare in a TV movie - a medium not generally well known for high quality, or originality?

Well. Uh. The writing sure is heavy-handed, isn't it? And it sure does rely on tropes and ideas so well-worn that we're well past beating a dead horse and entering the territory of "pulverizing the dead horse's bones one stroke at a time." Big city woman in a small town; small town peculiar, and unfriendly to strangers; small town unfriendly to modern medicine, science, or social ideations, including the great mysterious discipline of "Psychology." Adults being abuse to young kid; young kid expected to conform to all adult expectations, and being bullied and treated different. Aliens, monsters, supernatural/unnatural something or other; obligatory, gratuitous "creepy" imagery and sequences; the big city woman newcomer is sure to find out what's going on and connect it to this one specific kid that's different. Characters making abjectly poor decisions. And so on, and so on.

It's not that 'The day the world ended' is specifically bad. It's that the flick altogether gives away at least half of its plot within the first third, and that in every last capacity, we've effectively seen this before. Every idea in the writing has been employed countless times. Every thought in Gross' direction can be plucked from any of countless genre pieces - theatrical release and TV movie alike - from the better part of at least thirty years. Same for the editing, and the cinematography, and the music; the actors give decent performances, but sometimes they are guided into acting that's downright ham-fisted, or at least just unremarkable. From the beginning this is a title that we can "watch" rather passively, without actively engaging, and that only becomes more true as the minutes tick by. That's fine, I suppose, but if that's the type of viewing experience being offered, then we don't have much reason to bother in the first place, do we?

I do appreciate Winston's effects. While I'm usually of the mind that horror should suggest more than show - keeping the shock as a surprise - in this instance I wonder if it wouldn't have been better if we'd seen a lot more of the creature a lot sooner. I say this because with the picture being so roundly tried and true, and so readily revealing of its story, the minutes start to drag on. The pacing is fine in and of itself, but if we were sitting to watch ninety minutes of actors reciting the Latin alphabet, then the result would suffer in the same way this does with its very common notions. In turn, for whatever mild entertainment 'The day the world ended' has to offer, it's arguably just as true that the viewing experience is a bit of a chore.

When you get down to it this is suitably passable to whittle away some time on a quiet day. Maybe that's all it needs to be. Keep your expectations in check, and definitely don't go out of your way for it, but so long as you know what you're getting into - and how could you not? - then there are worse ways to spend your time. Take that as you will.