Cons: A couple of small details and a bigger budget may have helped.
The Bottom Line: Not the first "disaster" movie, but one of the few I've seen that focuses on the survivors' interactions and not on some lame monster they have to survive. Good stuff.
Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie''s plot.
You put three people in a room and inevitably two of them will gang up on the third. It’s human nature. If one of those three is a woman, you can pretty much guarantee which two will end up fighting. That’s the gist of Roger Corman’s 1960 classic LAST WOMAN ON EARTH.
Money man Harold Gern, his wife Ev, and lawyer/friend Martin Joyce are scuba diving off the coast of Puerto Rico. When they emerge from the water, they discover the rest of the island, possibly the world, is dead. They take up residence in a beach house they find and from there try to plan their next move. Eventually, as we knew would happen, Martin and Harold come to blows over Ev, who never really understood her place in Harold’s life before and even less so now that it’s just the three of them.
LAST WOMAN ON EARTH has become my new favorite Roger Corman movie. He’s really hit or miss overall--CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA was goofy, THE TERROR was sht, WASP WOMAN is middle of the road--but this time I think he really found something to say about the world. Harold Gern is a hard worker, a man who built his fortune from scratch and is trying to enjoy it. Ev is basically a trophy wife, gorgeous but of little consequence to Harold until she becomes the only thing he really “possesses” anymore. Martin is a man who understood his place in the world but now is wondering what’s the point anyway? When Ev asks him about children he says it’s all over for the human race “except for the shouting”. And I realized at that moment he had a point. If there were only three people left in the world, what would be the point in trying to pro-create? For one, genetically, how many successful generations could you make from two women and one man? And realistically . . . what would you teach them, how to dispose of bodies left lying about?
Filmed as an after-thought to CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA, as part of Corman’s “Puerto Rico Trilogy’, LAST WOMAN ON EARTH may have just been the deepest thing he ever shot. It stars Anthony Carbone, Betsy Jones-Moreland, and Robert Towne (billed as Edward Wain), the three main actors from HAUNTED SEA, in very similar roles. Again, Carbone and Jones-Moreland play a couple with Towne the outside man trying to get in, but this time things are shot more straightforward. Towne still has the best lines, but he’s not playing it as goofy as he did the first time--he’s very somber, in fact--and Jones-Moreland’s Ev isn’t the carefree oblivious character her Mary-Belle was. Carbone’s Harold isn’t much different from his Renzo; both are fast-talking swindlers in trouble with the law, but he plays the part so well, who’s complaining?
I think these three work brilliantly together and would love to see more movies with them, if any exist.
The horror here isn’t, as one would expect from today’s Hollywood, from whatever caused the disaster and from zombies or what-have-you created as an effect. In this movie, as far as the audience is shown, they really are the last three people alive. No mutated creatures menace them, no radioactive fall-out is slowly poisoning them. The terror here comes simply from wondering how the hell you move on, how do you keep going knowing that so little you do is, in the end, going to matter at all except to add days to your now inconsequential life? What do you do as a married couple (especially a newly-married one who don’t really know each other that well in the first place) with a third wheel knowing that, in reality, your marriage certificate means nothing and the foundation of your relationship is no stronger than what you make it from here on out. No matter what the strength or even the openness of your marriage, if you’re one of only three people left, someone’s going home lonely. And no one, even me at my most anti-social, wants to be that person.
LAST WOMAN ON EARTH, however, is not without flaws. Most of them have to do with the quality, not the story. In my copy, the focus shifts at times, there are cuts that obviously weren’t meant to be cuts but seem to be gaps where some of the reel is missing, and with the limits of a standard Corman budget and shooting schedule, we didn’t get any huge establishing shots to convey the real sense of loss the world over, nor even the island over. We see a body or two as they get back to shore and make the discovery, but I would have loved to see an overhead shot of just masses of dead lying about to better get a feel for how isolated these three are. As it is, we have to make do with focusing on these three characters and letting that lack of anyone else on screen convey to us that everyone else is dead. Good enough, I suppose, but you know Hollywood would have had several thousand dead strung along the streets of Puerto Rico.
On the other hand, the fact it’s not a big Hollywood movie can help. I doubt there were test audiences to dilute the movie to nothing and suggest changes that don’t need to be made (I’m still wishing I AM LEGEND had gone with the original ending as it more closely resembled Mattheson’s, but what do I know?). We don’t find out what happened to everyone and there’s no tacked-on ending showing other communities of survivors looking for each other. It’s these three and that’s all it needs to be. For all intents and purposes, Ev IS the last woman on earth. I applaud Corman (and Towne; he wrote the script) for that.
Roger Corman is not known for big expensive special effects or million-dollar blockbusters. If anything, he’s the king of the low-budget cheesefest. But in 1960 he did something pretty great, and LAST WOMAN ON EARTH is proof that he can make an awesome movie when he wants to. It’s in the public domain now, so you can probably find a copy in a bargain bin for next to nothing. I suggest you start looking; you won’t be disappointed.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.