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Last Woman On Earth
[RetroMedia / Image]
1960; color
Directed by Roger Corman
Starring: Betsy Jones-Moreland, Antony Carbone & Robert Towne
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One of the more original (yet still oddly Twilight Zone-like) of Roger Corman's early films, Last Woman On Earth is another great example of how he built a career on making the most out of almost next-to-nothing. With a cast of three—except for a handful of extras in the first scene and a few corpses—Corman delivers an interesting twist on the end-of-the-world scenario by adding the element of a potential love triangle. Harold and Evelyn Gern are on vacation in Puerto Rico when they're paid a visit by Harold's lawyer, Martin. Clearly something's afoot when your lawyer comes a calling during your vacation with the missus, and indeed Martin brings word of Harold's indictment for some unnamed crime. Harold shrugs this bad news off and tells Martin he's hired him to take care of things like that, then invites him to go scuba diving with them. So of they go… and when the three come back up from their dive, they find they can't breathe and need their scuba tanks above the water as well as below. To make matters worse, they find the captain of their chartered boat dead on the deck floor, and the engine won't turn over. (No oxygen = no ignition.) Fortunately they're close enough to the shore to just row the boat over there, which is what they do. As they're cutting through the jungle they realize they can breathe without the tanks and that the air is normal once again. Once they're back in town they quickly realize all the other people who were in the town are now dead, as are all radio and TV signals. Seeing as how staying in a corpse filled hotel with no TV is no fun, not to mention creepy, they head for a house owned by a friend of Harold at the edge of the island. With a truckload of supplies and a swanky new pad they settle in for a long haul, and become more and more inclined to think they really are the last people on Earth. Realizing that an island of rotting corpses is soon to be an island brimming with disease, they make plans to sail north, hoping that maybe they'll find other survivors of the mysterious oxygen loss. While all this is going on, Evelyn, who's long been disenchanted with Harold, begins to see Martin as a viable alternative. Their relationship smolders, and Harold's jealousy and rage mount to eventually explosive proportions. In the end, only one survives to claim Evelyn, AKA the last woman on earth, as his prize. While this is not the best of Corman's early films it's still pretty decent, and having it bundled on one disc with the previously reviewed Creature From The Haunted Sea and Battle Of Blood Island (for which Corman is executive producer, not director) with intros to each film from RC himself, makes the Puerto Rico Trilogy worth checking out.
—the Kommandant
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