The Day the World Ended

There are definitely too many references to other movies and story traditions in this flick. It starts like Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (the heroine driving a New Beetle – yech!), it continues with dark humor like a novel by Kafka (heroine with a badly defined mission comes to a strange place and meets a bunch of strangely hostile stereotype comic book characters of uncertain authority), then there's a whiff of Twin Peaks (hints of sexual abuse of minors and general depravity in the backwoods), then in comes E.T. (minor bonds with extraterrestrial), then it turns out that minor's mother was regarded by the populace as a kind of a witch and was treated accordingly. On top of that, there is a clear reference to a 50ies horror B-movie. (Hence the confusing title which has nothing to do with the story told here).

The references in themselves are not really bad or a rip-off. However, it would have been more fun, had they tied all that stuff together in a more coherent, rigid and orderly fashion. The pairing of psychology and the supernatural clearly does not work here. I didn't manage to find out what story the movie wants to tell and I suspect its makers could never really make up their mind. This is a pity, as the cast is quite good. I hope Nastassja Kinski still has a long career ahead of her. Not only for her looks, but also because she really is a versatile actress who in my opinion still didn't get her share of good movie parts. Randy Quaid and Bobby Edner are equally convincing in their roles, within the apparent limits of the script. The same goes for the rest of the characters who are parodies or stereotypes.