THE LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD (US/Spain/Liechtenstein - 1971) Directed by Kevin Billington. Written by Tom Rowe and Rachel Billington. Cast: Kirk Douglas, Yul Brynner, Samantha Eggar, Renato Salvatori, Jean-Claude Drouot, Fernando Rey, Massimo Ranieri, Aldo Sambrell, Tito Garcia, Victor Israel, Tony Skios, Luis Barboo, Tony Cyrus, Raul Castro, Maria Borge. (PG, 128 mins) Kino's new Blu-ray edition of 1971's THE LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD was already announced several months before the legendary Kirk Douglas died just prior to its release at the age of 103. Unfortunately, it's not one of the iconic actor's better films, but of course, in a storied career as long as his, there will be inevitable ups and downs. LIGHT was made at a time when Douglas found himself in a major slump following a trio of costly big-studio duds with 1968's THE BROTHERHOOD, 1969's THE ARRANGEMENT, and 1970's THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN. His box-office misfortune probably wasn't helped by the youth-driven "New Hollywood" era being ushered in by the likes of BONNIE AND CLYDE, THE GRADUATE, and EASY RIDER, so there was little chance Douglas was going to secure the Hollywood studio funding he needed for THE LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, a passion project that he'd been trying to get off the ground since 1965.
Kirk Douglas (1916-2020)
THE LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD was based on Jules Verne's posthumously-published 1905 adventure novel The Lighthouse at the End of the World, and Douglas had a history with the author's work, having starred with James Mason in Disney's 1954 live-action Verne adaptation 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA. It was a hugely popular box-office smash, kickstarting a Verneassaince in Hollywood that led to the likes of 1956's Oscar-winning AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, 1958's FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON, and 1959's JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH among several others. Douglas' own production company Bryna was able to front some of the budget for LIGHT, but he had to secure the remainder of the funding through European sources, namely producer Alexander Salkind, who would soon go on to oversee THE THREE MUSKETEERS, THE FOUR MUSKETEERS, and the SUPERMAN franchise. Salkind had been a minor player in the European film scene for some time, and, at least until his attempted "make two movies but only pay the actors for one" chicancery on the THREE/FOUR MUSKETEERS and SUPERMAN/SUPERMAN II, had a reputation as a hands-off producer who put up the money and let directors make the films they wanted to make. Salkind produced Orson Welles' 1962 Franz Kafka adaptation THE TRIAL and while the money ran out before the end of the shoot, it was one of the very few instances in his directing career that the mercurial Welles was able to work without meddling financiers looking over his shoulder and questioning every decision he made, and he always remained grateful to Salkind for demonstrating that trust and respect.
Similar money issues are apparent in much of THE LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, particularly some almost Antonio Margheriti-worthy miniatures and one embarrassing shot where a ship's crew is obviously just tiny, immobile action figures on a model vessel that could very well be floating in the bathtub in Douglas' hotel room. With its mostly European supporting cast (including spaghetti western stalwart Aldo Sambrell and Spanish genre vet Victor Israel) dubbed by numerous familiar voices, and some shocking violence that flirts with grindhouse brutality (surprising, considering that Verne adaptations were typically family-oriented fare), LIGHT frequently resembles a cost-cutting Harry Alan Towers production of the time despite some class brought to the proceedings by Douglas and Yul Brynner, which is probably where a good chunk of the money went. Douglas is Denton, an assistant lighthouse keeper at the southernmost tip of Argentina in 1865. An American Gold Rush prospector on the run from a checkered past and a broken heart, Denton butts heads with head lighthouse operator Capt. Moritz (Fernando Rey, right before his memorable turn as the villain in THE FRENCH CONNECTION), but gets along fine with affable young apprentice Felipe (Massimo Ranieri), who has a cute capuchin monkey sidekick named Mario. Mario is about as kiddie-friendly as LIGHT ever gets, as the monkey, Moritz, and Felipe will soon be murdered by a crew of slobbering pirates led by the sadistic Kongre (Brynner), who takes over the island and has a testy exchange with Denton ("Do I detect an American accent? I used to have dealings with your countrymen during the happy days of the slave trade!" Kongre sneers), as a cat-and-mouse game unfolds between his psycho crew and the sole surviving lighthouse keeper, who escapes and spends the rest of the film running around the island trying to stay out of sight and stay alive.
Shot on some treacherous, rocky terrain on the coast of Spain, surrounded by some intimidatingly rough waters, THE LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD is buoyed by some often breathtaking location work, and it's undeniably impressive watching a 55-year-old Douglas doing a lot of his own stunts, sprinting around the island, climbing rocks, and putting himself in harm's way as the waves violently crash on the shore. But that's also a LIGHT stumbling block as it suffers from erratic pacing and numerous shots that seem drawn-out and repetitive (how much of this movie is just people walking around?), and after a while, you realize it's by design so middle-aged Kirk can show off his spry athleticism and make sure we see that it's really him doing all this dangerous shit. British TV director Kevin Billington is at the helm, and his wife Rachel has an "additional dialogue" credit (along with an "additional ideas" credit for Salkind's wife Berta Dominguez D, the driving force behind the later Salkind fiasco WHERE IS PARSIFAL?), but make no mistake--this, like SPARTACUS, is Kirk's baby all the way. But it's not 1960, it's not a mega-budget Hollywood epic, and Kevin Billington is not Stanley Kubrick. The pacing issues improve somewhat at the midpoint when a ship en route from San Francisco to England wrecks and Kongre's men slaughter all of the survivors except Montefiore (Renato Salvatori), who's rescued by Denton, and high society matron Arabella (Samantha Eggar), who is held prisoner by Kongre for obvious assumed reasons.
There's an unconvincing subplot involving Kongre's attempt to trick Denton into believing that Arabella is really his long-lost love Emily Jane (Maria Borge in flashbacks), but it doesn't work at all--either as a Kongre plan or a LIGHT plot device. The film takes numerous liberties with the source material, and the finale gets dangerously close to turning into THE LAST LIGHTHOUSE ON THE LEFT, as Kongre has Montefiore strung up and flayed alive and Arabella gang-raped by his subhuman flunkies. The former is pretty tough to watch even now, and the latter mostly implied, and with the downbeat, nihilistic ending (not to mention a still-controversial instance of animal cruelty where a galloping horse is tripped), LIGHT is decidedly not the kind of film one generally associates with the idea of "Jules Verne." National General Pictures cut nearly 30 minutes from THE LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD for its US release in the summer of 1971. The US cut ran 101 minutes and carried an all-ages "GP" rating, obviously losing the more graphic material but likely tightening up some of the extremely slack pacing. Regardless, it was another flop for Douglas, but Brynner and Eggar would reteam in 1972 on the short-lived CBS series ANNA AND THE KING, an ill-advised period sitcom that was canceled mid-season, with Brynner reprising his Oscar-winning role from 1956's THE KING AND I. Kino's LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD Blu-ray (because physical media is dead) is the uncut--and entirely too long--128-minute European version, still sporting a PG rating on the packaging but with all of the hard-R violence intact.
THE LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
opening in Toledo, OH on 8/25/1971
THE CHOSEN aka HOLOCAUST 2000 aka RAIN OF FIRE (Italy/UK - 1977; US release 1978) Directed by Alberto De Martino. Written by Sergio Donati, Alberto De Martino and Michael Robson. Cast: Kirk Douglas, Simon Ward, Agostina Belli, Anthony Quayle, Romolo Valli, Adolfo Celi, Virginia McKenna, Alexander Knox, Ivo Garrani, Spiros Focas, Massimo Foschi, Geoffrey Keen, Alan Hendricks, Peter Cellier, John Carlin, Penelope Horner, Caroline Horner, Vittorio Fanfoni, Teresa Rossi Passante, Andrea Esterhazy. (R, 102 mins) The Italian ripoff is one of the most enjoyably rewarding aspects of being a fan of '70s and '80s exploitation and Eurocult cinema. If there was a game-changing American blockbuster (THE GODFATHER, THE EXORCIST, JAWS, STAR WARS), an immensely popular genre effort (DAWN OF THE DEAD, CONAN THE BARBARIAN, RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II), or even an influential film that wasn't necessarily American-made but was a worldwide hit (THE ROAD WARRIOR), it was guaranteed that at least a dozen shameless Italian ripoffs would follow in its wake. These often starred slumming, past-their-prime American and sometimes British actors who weren't getting lead roles at home and often had to resort to TV guest spots, considered at the time to be a step down. By contrast, European producers were offering starring roles, top billing, treated them like royalty, gave them an all-expenses-paid Italian vacation, and all they had to do was put in the bare minimum for the biggest paycheck, or in many cases, a suitcase full of tax-free cash. In the annals of Italian ripoffs, the 1978 OMEN knockoff THE CHOSEN stands out from the crowd, not just because it's unusually ambitious, has a much bigger budget than most of its Eurotrash imitation brethren, and a distinguished supporting cast, but because it stars a surprisingly engaged Kirk Douglas. Already a Hollywood legend by this point and not exactly hurting for work (he had Brian De Palma's THE FURY in theaters at the same time), Douglas had enough clout and his name enough value that he could've gotten away with doing as little as possible, shot his close-ups, and gone sight-seeing while his stand-in did the heavy lifting and competent editors could create the illusion that he was there the whole time, but he approaches this with all the gravitas and teeth-clenched, lock-jawed intensity of SPARTACUS.
THE CHOSEN works largely because Kirk clearly believes in it. In an era when aging leading men who stayed in Hollywood were often begrudgingly starring in glossy, big-budget horror movies that they never would've made in their heyday--Gregory Peck wasn't that enthused about being in THE OMEN, and William Holden did DAMIEN: OMEN II because he turned THE OMEN down only to see it become a huge phenomenon--Douglas passionately brings his A-game to THE CHOSEN and busts his ass like his reputation and the future of his career depended on it. We're obviously not talking Henry Fonda literally phoning in his performance from his living room in the 1977 Italian JAWS ripoff TENTACLES or Richard Harris turning up, presumably at gunpoint, in Bruno Mattei's 1988 RAMBO knockoff STRIKE COMMANDO 2, but it's always fascinating to find someone of Douglas' stature in a movie like THE CHOSEN, and usually, it's for the wrong reasons, especially in those occasional instances where they don't even stick around to dub themselves. But THE CHOSEN isn't a run-of-the-mill, quickie Italian ripoff, and perhaps Douglas recognized that. It deals with the same core ideas as THE OMEN and has some very OMEN-esque cues in Ennio Morricone's score, but also has the political and corporate plot elements that would eventually turn up in subsequent OMEN sequels as well as other Italian ripoffs like the insane THE VISITOR. It's a rare case of an Italian ripoff inadvertently influencing the later sequels to the movie it was ripping off in the first place, including a disturbing sequence in a maternity ward that foreshadows the third OMEN film, 1981's THE FINAL CONFLICT.
Douglas stars as Robert Caine, a successful London-based American industrialist whose Caine Enterprises is about to break ground on a nuclear power plant in the Middle East. The first red flag appears when Caine's wife Eva (Virginia McKenna), who opposes the construction of the plant, is killed by a fanatical protester (Massimo Foschi) in a botched assassination attempt on Caine. Then the Prime Minister (Ivo Garrani) who approved the plant is defeated in an election by military hardliner Harbin (Spiros Focas) who sternly informs Caine that his project is too dangerous and will never come to pass. One by one, everyone who opposes the construction of the plant is killed in a variety of OMEN-inspired freak accidents (including a bisection that would be copied in a much gorier fashion in DAMIEN: OMEN II, which opened two months later) as Caine, over the objections of his son Angel (Simon Ward), starts to question whether the plant should be built. A chance meeting with a priest (Romolo Valli), who may as well be named Father Exposition, leads to Caine's realization that the design and layout of the power plant is an atomic-era recreation of a Biblical prophecy of the apocalypse brought about by the Antichrist (and to further hammer it home, Father Obvious emphatically declares "The dragon of the apocalypse...is your atomic plant!"). The priest tells him that the Antichrist is a mirror image of Jesus, and with the help of Caine Enterprises chief computer programmer Griffith (Anthony Quayle), Caine discovers that a nonsense mathematical equation is really the revelation that he has "generated something that is not human." This is just before Sara (Agostina Belli), the much-younger anti-nuke journalist with whom has been having a fling, announces that she's pregnant with his child.
Directed and co-written by Alberto De Martino, best known for the blasphemous, goat-rimming 1974 Italian EXORCIST ripoff THE ANTICHRIST (belatedly released in the US in the fall of 1978 as THE TEMPTER) and whose next film was the MST3K favorite THE PUMAMAN, THE CHOSEN is endlessly entertaining despite boasting the most awkwardly-cadenced protest chant you'll ever hear ("What do our children...want to be...when they grow up...ALIVE!") and its inability to play its cards close to the vest. This makes some of Belli's performance as Sara a little baffling, since by the time she's acting strange and refusing to enter a church, we already know who the Antichrist is thanks to De Martino using no subtlety in his direction of Ward, making him look sinister from his first moment onscreen (and he's named "Angel," for Christ's sake). The screenplay has some intriguing ideas that lead to arresting images, like Caine holding a meeting of his 12-member board of directors that's staged exactly like The Last Supper. The sight of the inscription "IESVS" carved into a cave wall near the plant site and the use of the equation "2√231" to illustrate the priest's assertion that the Antichrist is a mirror image of Jesus and Griffith reminding Caine that digital numbers can form words won't fool anyone who's ever looked at the Dio logo upside-down or keyed "80085" into a calculator when they were in third grade, but like the De Martino's THE ANTICHRIST using sexual frustration as the impetus for demonic possession, THE CHOSEN is film that tries harder than it needs to and has ambitions beyond presenting a rote (yet memorable) series of splattery kill scenes.
Originally titled HOLOCAUST 2000 for its European release in late 1977, the film was rechristened THE CHOSEN when it arrived in the US in the spring of 1978 in an altered version with a different ending. The HOLOCAUST 2000 ending is more open-ended and suggests that Caine and Sara's child is the Second Coming and will battle its evil, mirror image older brother. But the cobbled-together US ending features newly-shot footage of a bearded Douglas walking through an airport, intercut with Angel vowing to complete the nuclear power plant by his 33rd birthday in a meeting with the board of directors, which he's just increased from 12 to 21 members. This goes on while an unseen figure--Caine, played by a pair of hands probably not belonging to Douglas--blows up the Caine Enterprises headquarters to ensure Angel's evil plan never comes to fruition. It isn't known whether De Martino shot this new footage commissioned by US distributor American International (ABBY and FOOD OF THE GODS editor Corky Ehlers is credited with "additional editing" in the US credits), but that was the version I remember seeing when CBS aired this in prime time in summer 1983 under its HOLOCAUST 2000 title. The film has undergone a number of title changes over the years, which hasn't been easy to keep straight given the two different versions. Despite being retitled THE CHOSEN for the US, the title reverted back to HOLOCAUST 2000 for TV and on Vestron Video's 1985-issued VHS, even though it has the CHOSEN version's "Kirk blows shit up" ending, and when it finally appeared on DVD from Lionsgate in 2008, it was retitled RAIN OF FIRE, but was the original HOLOCAUST 2000 European version without the explosion. Confused yet?
Scream Factory's new Blu-ray (because physical media is dead) contains both the HOLOCAUST 2000 and THE CHOSEN cuts, albeit in different aspect ratios (HOLOCAUST 2000 is 2.35:1, while THE CHOSEN is 1.78:1). There are minor tweaks to both versions aside from their endings (the conclusion to an early confrontation in an asylum between Caine and his wife's killer plays a bit more smoothly in the US cut), with both clocking in at 102 minutes, THE CHOSEN running a few seconds longer. Oddly, a Douglas-Belli sex scene is slightly more explicit in the US version, with some additional Belli nudity and a few extra Kirk thrusts. In a display of Douglas' absolute commitment to the project, which includes doing his own stunts like being thrown off a hospital gurney and into the air by asylum inmates while strait-jacketed, both versions showcase full-frontal Kirk in an insane dream sequence where he envisions the end of the world while running and flailing around a desert in his birthday suit. Whether it's a sense of professional dedication or just Douglas showing off his still-sterling 61-year-old physique (which he would also be happy to do in 1980's ridiculous SATURN 3, possibly influencing the future exhibitionism of co-star Harvey Keitel), his willingness to throw himself into his role helps sell the hell out of THE CHOSEN, a gem among '70s Italian genre ripoffs that deserves to be better known.
THE CHOSEN airing on CBS as HOLOCAUST 2000 on 7/30/1983
Similar money issues are apparent in much of THE LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, particularly some almost Antonio Margheriti-worthy miniatures and one embarrassing shot where a ship's crew is obviously just tiny, immobile action figures on a model vessel that could very well be floating in the bathtub in Douglas' hotel room. With its mostly European supporting cast (including spaghetti western stalwart Aldo Sambrell and Spanish genre vet Victor Israel) dubbed by numerous familiar voices, and some shocking violence that flirts with grindhouse brutality (surprising, considering that Verne adaptations were typically family-oriented fare), LIGHT frequently resembles a cost-cutting Harry Alan Towers production of the time despite some class brought to the proceedings by Douglas and Yul Brynner, which is probably where a good chunk of the money went. Douglas is Denton, an assistant lighthouse keeper at the southernmost tip of Argentina in 1865. An American Gold Rush prospector on the run from a checkered past and a broken heart, Denton butts heads with head lighthouse operator Capt. Moritz (Fernando Rey, right before his memorable turn as the villain in THE FRENCH CONNECTION), but gets along fine with affable young apprentice Felipe (Massimo Ranieri), who has a cute capuchin monkey sidekick named Mario. Mario is about as kiddie-friendly as LIGHT ever gets, as the monkey, Moritz, and Felipe will soon be murdered by a crew of slobbering pirates led by the sadistic Kongre (Brynner), who takes over the island and has a testy exchange with Denton ("Do I detect an American accent? I used to have dealings with your countrymen during the happy days of the slave trade!" Kongre sneers), as a cat-and-mouse game unfolds between his psycho crew and the sole surviving lighthouse keeper, who escapes and spends the rest of the film running around the island trying to stay out of sight and stay alive.
