Customer Reviews

The Last Woman on Earth

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Great film for a decent price. The concept of the movie itself, allows the viewer to think about what they would do in the same situation. It shows basic human instinct, and a world where there are two adams, for the one eve.

Great video and audio quality.

Imagine that a nukeular bomb went off and suddenly there was only one girl left in the world and you were one of two guys. How hard do you think the two of you would fight over that girl? That's the question posed by this excellent Roger Corman explotation film. Of course the girl is gorgeous and of course the guys come up w ith ever more ingenious ways to get her attention. This is a classic black and white "B" movie.

I've been a fan of Roger Corman films since the first time I saw Little Shop of Horrors on WPIX when I was about 10. Since then I've done my best to see all of his films that I can.

Yes, he's films are a lot like those of Ed Wood - they are all l ow budget Sci Fi or Horror Films and Last Woman on Earth is no exception.

Is it cheesey? Yes. Is the plot ridiculous? Yes. Did I have a good time watching it? Yes.

This one starts off fairly well. We are introduced to the three main, and as it turns out ONLY characters at a cockfight (!) in Puerto Rico. Antony Carbone (Bucket Of Blood, Pit And The Pendulum) is a self-made zillionaire, Betsy Jones-Mooreland is his wife, and Robert Towne is their lawyer. The trio heads out for a day of fun and scuba-diving, unaware that while they are busy swimming below, the world has come to an end! Upon surfacing, they realize the air is unbreathable, so they use their oxygen tanks to survive until they reach the safety of the shore. It appears that the jungle fauna has replenished the oxygen supply in short order. Corman shows us some desolate, semi-disturbing shots of the aftermath of whatever holocaust has occurred, including a dead child on the side of the road and a ghostly car hitting a curb. Unfortunately, this all happens within the first twenty minutes. The final hour and ten minutes is like an episode of the world's most tedious soap-opera. The three characters argue, fight, pout, and talk-talk-talk their way to the final credits, mostly whining about their "love triangle" situation or waxing philosophical about the evils of money. There is NO action or intrigue (unless you consider half-hearted fist-fights exciting), just excrutiating oration and endless bloviating! I was tempted to throw a lamp through my own TV screen! Good luck with this one...

Having finished Creature From the Haunted Sea early, Corman decided to put the locations and talent he still had on hand to work on another film. Robert Towne wrote the script in a rush at the same time it was being filmed (and at the same time he was acting in it), so don't expect another "Chinatown". A mobster, his wife, and a lawyer are scubadiving when some disaster (maybe an atomic war) burns out the oxygen in the air. They are saved because they still have about an hours worth of air in their tanks and are near an oxygen producing jungle. At first they work together, but a love triangle forms. Some intelligence shines through, but ultimately the film is little more than talking heads and arguments. Nothing profound.

As for the picture quality, the colour has mostly faded to shades of red.

Don't even think about buying this movie. Awarded 1 star only because ZERO was not given as an option. I received it as a gift ( a GAG gift, as it turns out...) so I felt obligated to watch at least some of it. Bad acting, terrible script, non-existant special effects and a cheesey music score. The only thing worse than the movie itself is the DVD transfer, which features a bleached out, grainy print and miserable sound to go with it. You can't do any worse than this. Spend your [money] on beer or cigarettes.

I am a fan of Corman films, for all their crude effects and mediocre acting. This film wants to be a kind of existential Darwinian drama, where 2 men find themselves surviving with one woman that is serious trouble. Set in Puerto Rico, a lawyer comes to visit a vacationing real estate mogul in order to deal with his latest indictment. From the start, the guy is arrogant and uncaring, while the straight, if flaccid, lawyer is his resentful foil. Then there is the wife: she feels trapped and unable to get close to her swaggering husband, so is provocative to the lawyer and a drunk. All is going according to plan until they emerge from a dive to find all animals on the island dead; it appears that this has happened all over the world. As the mogul attempts to take over, the sexual tension becomes unbearable and the men fight.

Now that is a good premise for a script and it is pretty well written. What sinks the film is that the acting is so bad that I couldn't believe any of it. You can tell that Corman yearns to develop the themes and even the dialogue is more interesting than your traditional horror film, but the actors have little chemistry and their performances are unbearably flat (not helped by the booth-dubbing that added voices later, after filming on-site).

Not recommended. There are funner 50s horror films.

Some of the reviews were a bit negative, but this product is fine.

Nothing wrong with it at all.

Thanks for the fast shipping!

Roger Corman was the Ernie Banks of filmmaking (the difference being that Ernie Banks was actually good at what he did). Let's make two, Corman said on more than one occasion - we've got this set, we've got some actors, and we've got a few days, so let's make a second movie on-the-fly. And so it was that The Last Woman on Earth was made alongside Creature From the Haunted Sea on location in Puerto Rico. It looks and sounds like the story and dialogue were all made up on the spot - and that's pretty close to the truth. That's the only excuse Robert Towne has for giving us such a miserably boring script. Talk about the world ending with a whimper!

Towne didn't just write the script, though; he also starred in the film (under the name Edward Wain) as lawyer Martin Joyce. He's joined by Antony Carbone (who seems to be attempting to channel both Dean Martin and Bing Crosby simultaneously - with little success) and Betsy Jones-Moreland (the "last woman," as you might have guessed). Martin's a lawyer for shady businessman Harold Gern, who is "vacationing" (far away from an indictment) in Puerto Rico with his wife Evelyn. The three just so happen to be scuba diving when something big happens up above - all of the oxygen in the air mysteriously disappears, killing everyone who wasn't fortunate enough to be hooked up to an oxygen tank at the time. The oxygen soon returns as mysteriously as it vanished, and our three survivors are able to keep on surviving (unfortunately for us, the viewing audience). They hole themselves up in a beachside villa and basically just bicker amongst themselves for the rest of the movie. Harold is a power freak, and his constant planning drives Ev and Martin up the wall (and closer together, although there is not the first trace of any passion in their "romance"). Martin thinks that the whole apocalypse thing makes the Gerns' marriage null and void, but Harold disagrees. The men argue about more than sharing Harold's wife, though. My favorite is the boat argument - there are hundreds of abandoned boats out at the marina, but these two chowder heads actually duke it out over sole control of Harold's boat. Can't we all just get along, what with it being the end of the world and all? The answer to that would be no.

The only good thing about The Last Woman on Earth is the fact that it's relatively short, clocking in at 64 minutes - that's about all a sane person can take of these three incredibly annoying characters. I've seen some bad Roger Corman films in my time, but this has to be the most boring of the bunch.

Terrible plots, bad acting, hilarious dialog and effects that aren't so special not withstanding, I'm a fan of bad science fiction movies. For the most part, I'm not the type to make fun of them. There's just something about them that pulls me which I really can't put into words. So I bought this movie (more accurately, I bought a three dvd/9 movie package dirt cheap specifically for this movie) because it sounded intriguing. I found it to be rather captivating. A billionaire, his wife and lawyer go scuba diving while on vacation only to emerge and find it impossible to breath. Luckily, they have several hours worth of oxygen in their tanks. The boat's engine doesn't fire, matches don't light and they can't breath. It's become apparent that somehow, the oxygen supply was completely drained while the three were submerged. From that point, the movie turns from its sci-fi premise to a case study of human behavior during an apocalyptic event. The actors involved performed their roles professionally. I detected no campiness and because of this, they made the love triangle and dire uncertainty aspects of the plot believable. Interestingly enough, I don't consider this to be in the bad sci-fi category for a number of reasons. The acting was good and because the movie was more of a psycological study of human nature in extreme situations, there weren't any special effects but the cinematography was done very well. There were a number of shots that I made me think "that's pretty creative". Even the fight scenes weren't too laughable. This movie is almost entirely dialog and I thought it was very well done. The ending was a little, shall we say, limp wristed but this doesn't ruin the movie. All in all, I was surprised to find this movie to be this well done.