Martin Compart

THE BRUTAL, THE STUPID, AND THE NEEDLESS
THE FINAL (PLAGUED) YEARS OF MANKIND

This is the title of a virtually unknown horror movie from the early 1970s (when the Vietnam War) was still going on that seems to be lost. Here are excerpts from a recently found (damning) film review:

Wow, what a silly movie.

I don’t believe it would be possible to make one sillier.
Concerning the future, it gives in one eddying concentration almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about progress of science and society served up with a sauce of self-pity that is all its own.

It’s all about anonymous conspirators of brutal intelligence – may the be hippies, billionaires, or aliens or all of the three – who are going to accomplish the ultimate brain damage among their followers. They link them by a computerized mind, artificial intelligence so to speak that has total access to huge databases but renders those unhappy masses completely stupid and turns them into mindless zombies playing computerized games and in between killing each other: Only the stupidest calves choose their own butcher.

In this case, they elect a comedian from television to lead them. The guy has apparently ditched the hair dye and swapped his notoriously blonde hairdo for his natural silver shade: a hairspray labyrinth instead of mind. This man is a hunter of souls who sells all the souls to aliens or devils or to Deutsche Bank or to the Mafia (after the success of The Godfather, the mindless filmmakers could not leave it out!) and leads the people to destroy the symbols of democracy including the White House when, at the same time, they suffer not only a brain virus but a pandemic spreading – of all places – from Mao’s China! Two viruses for the price of one. What kind of absurdity is this?

A quaint smell of Mephistopheles is perceptible for a while. With a broomstick between their legs, the filmmakers celebrate Walpurgis Night and ride to the Brocken to kiss Satan’s ass. Never for a moment does one believe any of this foolish story; for a moment is there anything amusing or convincing in its dreary series of strained events. It is immensely and strangely dull. It is not even to be laughed at. There is not one good-looking nor sympathetic nor funny personality in the inept, hammy cast; there is, indeed, no scope at all for looking well or acting like a rational creature amid these mindless, imitative absurdities. The film’s air of having something grave to say is transparent pretense.

It’s a tepid horror movie about an unlikely dystopian future that despises mankind and all values of humanity. At the end of the movie, nobody survives as the stupid swarm out to welcome the disease and plague with open arms, without any protection and turning down each vaccine because it would cure them from their mental state. They are like lemmings.

Let’s hope that the brutal will never be joined by the stupid and the needless and that such absurdity, the figment of a screenwriter’s sick mind will never become the object of mindless future cultists who devour any trash.

Er wurde für seine Darstellung des Virus und des Comedian in Doppelrolle für den Goldenen Otto nominiert.