Original title: El refugio del miedo
A rare attempt at a post-apocalypse story from Spain – and on the evidence of this one, it’s not hard to see why they didn’t make many more. Talkative, pretentious and achingly slow, it’s a film so dull that when it was released on UK video (under the inexplicable title Survivors of the Last Race – what last race?) it had to be dressed up in a sleeve that made it look like an Italian Mad Max (1979) clone, complete with muscle-bound, bald-headed warriors and big guns.
Which couldn’t actually be any further from the truth if it tried – this is no action packed run-around, but a sombre, would-be serious study of what happens when a disparate group of people are cooped up a fall-out shelter to wait out the after-effects of a nuclear war. Married couples Carol (Patty Shepard) and Arthur (Pedro Maria Sanchez) and Robert (Craig Hill ) and Margie (Teresa Gimpera) are joined by Robert and Margie’s son Chris (Fernando Hilbeck) in a stylishly appointed bunker where they talk, argue, talk, do nothing, talk, play pool and talk. And boy do they talk. Endlessly spouting dull, pompous claptrap as the meagre plot unfolds around them. Which would be fine if what they had to say was interesting, but it isn’t, nor is it particularly well written.
It all ends badly of course as director Jose Ulloa and his co-writer Miguel Sanz hammer home their potentially interesting but tediously rendered point about how social barriers collapse under pressure and how inter-personal relations can fracture when individuals are forced to live together in a pressure-cooker environment. There’s sex, suicide, hare-brained trips to the irradiated surface, jealousy and ridiculous dialogue aplenty before the fade out and none of it is anywhere near as interesting as it should be. Except, perhaps, for the bizarre moment when Carol, having been admonished for swaning around the bunker in her underwear, turns up for dinner dressed in a bright yellow anti-radiation suit, which is certainly an arresting moment if one that’s utterly nonsensical and totally laughable.
Jose Ulloa – best known for nothing else at all – directs as ploddingly as he writes, content all too often to just leave his camera sitting there waiting for his bored looking cast to wander in and monotone their lines. Director of photography Antonio Millan seems equally uninvolved and the film – even allowing for the fact that the UK videotape was clearly very cheaply produced – looks awful. Little is made of the claustrophobic confines of the shelter and the hopelessness of the situation that the characters find themselves in is sublimated in favour of soap opera clichés. The cast is the most interesting part of the film, a fine collection of Spanish exploitation regulars who have all done far more interesting work than this.
At its core, there’s a good idea at work in Survivors of the Last Race but Ulloa’s ham-fisted direction and the inevitable loss of a certain something when the dialogue was translated renders the whole enterprise all but unwatchable. Even hardcore fans of the post-apocalypse movie – and I’d certainly count myself among their ranks – will be extremely hard-pressed to find anything of worth in this dreary effort.
The EOFFTV Review 