Friday, May 01, 2009

Movie review – “In the Year 2889” (1968) *1/2

One of the remakes Larry Buchan did for AIP for television. This one redoes the Roger Corman apocalyptic flick The Day the World Ended; it wasn’t much of an original movie (a bunch of different characters squabbling inside a house while mutants roam outside) but it’s better than this. There’s no washed up B lister to headline this cast – no John Ashley, Tommy Kirk or John Agar. There is Quinn O’Hara who played a sexy dish in The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini – and actually she gives the best performance as a skanky former stripper turned gangster’s moll.

There’s a couple of dodgy gangsters, a mutant, a father who seems very keen to have his daughter start breeding (she’s waiting for her boyfriend to come back but he’s a mutant). Buchanan throws in a bit of religion. Some of the make up is okay for a low budgeter and there are one or two effective sequences of characters walking around the forest at night – Buchanan was actually good at these, using silence and shadows. But then he snaps out of it with some crummy talking scenes. So-so acting, an enjoyable scene with O’Hara and the other girl wearing bikinis in the pool (just because its post apocalypse doesn’t mean you can’t catch some rays), and an abrupt ending.

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