What it has going for it: Trying to pull positives out of Day The World Ended is like having poisonous snakes in your pants and trying to work out which one you like best. But if day The World Ended was a nest of vipers feeding upon my downstairs area then my favourite one would be Richard Denning. Denning is a Deadly Movies favourite, featuring in a massive five creature features in the 1950s, including the awesome Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954). It’s also worth noting that Lori Nelso of Revenge of The Creature (1955) appears as the eye candy for Denning (good Black Lagoon link up). There’s a half decent monster design but it’s delivered in such a way that there’s little to no threat, instead it just ambles around the forest with little more menace than a disorientated rabbit with myxomatosis.
Why It’s a letdown: Because its so utterly utterly boring. The film has delusions of grandeur on a massive scale. The poster for Day The World Ended features a very cool looking post-apocalyptic monster dragging a helpless blonde away while civilisation burns to the ground in its wake. Wrong! To say the poster is an embellishment of the film’s content is an understatement. There’s no city levelling explosions or ruins, no great fireballs, just a mountain hut where the world’s only survivors meet to annoy each other and the audience. Then a wobbly foam creature turns up and kidnaps poor old Lori Nelson who by this point is probably game for anything that gets her away from the daytime TV actors who continue to do as little as possible back at the hut. The post apocalypse world has never been so dull or underplayed.
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