(Ultimo Deseo)
Spain. 1976.
Crew
Director – Leon Klimovsky, Screenplay – Gabriel Burgos, Story – Vicente Aranda, Gabriel Burgos & Joaquim Jorda, Producers – Salvador Romero & José Luis Renedo Tamayo, Photography – Manuel Torres, Music – Miguel Asins Arbo. Production Company – Trefilms.
Cast
Alberto de Mendoza (Professor Bill Fulton), Paul Naschy (Borne/Warner), Maria Perschy (Lily), Nadushka (Clara), Tomas Pico (Victor), Ricardo Palacios (Dr Edward Robertson), Julia Sali ‘La Poncha’ (Marion), Teresa Gimpera (Berta), Emiliano Redondo (Dr Brendan Messier), Diana Polokov (Tania), Antonio Mayans (Vasily Seriakov), Leona Devine (Luna), Carmen Platero (Greta)
Plot
A group of doctors and an ambassador gather at the Villa Vilmore in the Spanish countryside. The group prepare to hold a party based on the theories of the Marquis de Sade where the attendees are allowed to indulge any pleasure they like. Several women have been recruited for the occasion. Just before the festivities begin, a nuclear weapon is detonated. As they realise what has happened, the group try to organise themselves to survive in the villa. On a sortie into town to obtain supplies, they discover the villagers, who were attending a local festival, have all been blinded by the flash of the bomb – their group was protected because they were in the villa’s wine cellar. Victor panics and starts shooting at the mob of blinded. This enrages the blind townspeople who surrounded the villa to attack those inside.
Leon Klimovsky (1906-96) was a prolific Spanish director who turned out 76 films between the 1940s and 70s. Up until the late 1960s, most of Klimovsky’s work was a series of crime thrillers, dramas, Westerns and musicals. Klimovsky made his first horror film with Edge of Fear (1964), followed by other efforts in the Euro horror cycle of the day such as Vengeance of the Zombies (1972), The Saga of the Draculas (1973), The Vampire’s Night Orgy (1973), The Devil’s Possessed (1974), I Hate My Body (1974), A Dragonfly for Each Corpse (1975), The Strange Love of the Vampires (1975) and Trauma (1978). Klimovsky is best remembered for his films with Paul Naschy, in particular The Werewolf and the Vampire Woman (1971) and Dr Jekyll and the Wolfman (1972). Naschy does turn up here – although is not the star of the show – and in a surprise move plays a more brutish and thuggish part than the romantic, tormented figure we usually see him as.
The People Who Own the Dark was sold as a horror film. The surprise in watching it is that it is not so much a horror film as it is a film about an outbreak of Nuclear War. It joins a number of nuclear war films made throughout the 1950s and 60s, although is not a particularly distinguished variant on the theme. It essentially consists of a nuclear weapon going off – the hows and whys are not dwelt on and we see nothing more of the detonation than the flash of light – which the group survive because they were preparing to hold their party in the wine cellar. Everyone else who was above ground is blinded – something that is not in reality a probable outcome on a mass level as the film has it unless people were reasonably close to the detonation and looking directly at the explosion.
The latter half of the film has the partygoers trapped inside the villa and surrounded by the blind as they attack, enraged after one of the sighted opened fire and shot several of their number. Here Leon Klimovsky reveals his true intention, which would appear to be to make a George Romero film. The People Who Own the Dark could be Night of the Living Dead (1968) with the same plot of a group at siege inside a house and the attacking blind substituted for zombies. The film even opts for another of the bleak endings that Romero offered in Night of the Living Dead and The Crazies (1973).
Another analogy might be to John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) from the same year, another Romero-influenced film about a police station at siege from gangland crazies outside. That said, it feels a stretch of plausibility to regard the blind on the same level of aggregate threat as zombies or an attacking gang; in real life, the blind are usually people we treat with sympathy because of their disability.
Leon Klimovsky was also one of the dullest directors of this era. His directorial style was flat, uninvolved and you could never say there was ever anything in his set-ups that involved you or created tension. The crucial killer about The People Who Own the Dark is its tameness. It features people gathered for an orgy based on the principles of the Marquis de Sade but this goes no further than about five women parading about in diaphanous nightgowns. The tensions within the group are largely unexplored – I kept thinking of how this contrasted to the grim survivalism of a similar work like the electrifying The Divide (2011). Things here are only confined to dramas of fending off the attackers outside rather than any of the potential internal tensions, except perhaps for overweight Ricardo Palacios who strips to his underwear and crawls about grunting like a pig.
For its US release, the film was cut of twelve minutes. As a result, there have been all manner of rumours about what these scenes consist of, including stories of cuts with much more nudity. However, seeing the uncut version 94 minute version of the film, there is nothing there that would not pass muster on a tv airing today and certainly no more nudity and sex scenes. Presumably what was cut was some of the more savage scenes where the blind people attack the people in the villa but these are fairly mild scenes.
Trailer here