Welcome back to B-Movie Enema!

Quly is continuing on and for this third week, we go to the “other” “down under” for this cult classic from New Zealand. This week, I’m going to discuss Geoff Murphy’s The Quiet Earth. Interestingly, I’ve been familiar with Geoff Murphy for almost 35 years. In 1990, I was super excited to see Young Guns II. I love those two Young Guns flicks. In 1992, I went and saw Freejack which he also directed. So, yeah, I was pleasantly surprised that his name was attached to this because I knew who he was.

Plus, us Geoffs stick together.

Anyway, the origins of The Quiet Earth began in 1981. The obvious connection was that the book this was based on was published that year. We’ll touch upon that in just a moment. But 1981 also saw the release of New Zealand’s first bonafide box office hit, Goodbye Pork Pie. The director of Goodbye Pork Pie? That’s right! It’s Geoff Murphy. And, yes, it basically made his career. He followed that up with Utu which led to a discussion around New Zealand’s history and the treatment of Maori people. After Utu, The Quiet Earth was Murphy’s next film and this hit cult classic status as well. Most of the 90s was spent in Hollywood with mixed results for Murphy, but he would return to New Zealand to be the 2nd Unit Director on fellow Kiwi Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Murphy passed away in December 2018.

The source novel for The Quiet Earth comes from New Zealand author, and ex-pat from the United Kingdom, Craig Harrison. The book basically tells the story in three main sections, following just a trio of characters. Beyond being a novelist, he was also a playwright. While he might have ended up being better known for his stageplays, Harrison’s books ranged from fairly hard sci-fi/speculative fiction to young adult stuff. So he built a career around a wide range. Between the heavy sci-fi of the novel this is based on, and the subsequent adaptation, the book for The Quiet Earth has also become something of a cult classic as well.

Frankly, I’m pretty excited about watching this movie, so let’s not screw around and check out The Quiet Earth.

The movie begins with a sun rising over the ocean. Seagulls fly into our sights. Various other birds and animals chirp in the distance. All seems calm, including Zac Hobson (played by Bruno Lawrence). Hobson is sleeping peacefully and naked on top of his bed – we’ll find out why he seems almost unstirring and naked on top of his covers later. All seems nice for this lovely July morning. Keep in mind that this is the Southern Hemisphere, so July is early winter there. At 6:12am the sun suddenly turns red and it looks like it explodes for a brief moment before everything seemingly returns to normal.

However, it’s almost deafeningly quiet. The sounds of birds are gone. The radio isn’t broadcasting anything. He tries calling his work but no one answers. The gas station is unmanned, even though there is an electric tea kettle burning. The bathroom at the gas station is locked from the inside and a magazine is lying on the floor. Cars are empty on the road as he continues to work. He stops at a friend’s home only to find water leaking from the second-floor bathtub and uneaten breakfasts on trays on top of the beds.

Hobson is alone.

It’s already unnerving enough to go about your day to not see any other human being… hell, Hobson’s not seeing any other living thing. However, it’s even more unnerving to see things left unattended all over the place. When he’s briefly distracted on the road, he nearly slams into an unattended gas tanker. As he continues to investigate what happened, he comes across a town burning with no firemen putting the flames out. Why is it burning? A passenger jet crashed into it. Yet, when he finds a row of seats from the wreckage, the safety belts are fastened, but there are no human remains left in the seats.

Zac arrives at his place of work, Delenco. Delenco is an international group working on a very specific project, dubbed Project Flashlight. Again, no one else is at Delenco and no other Delenco installation is responding to any form of communication. At 6:12am that morning, there was a report stating that Delenco was going forward with Project Flashlight as planned. Zac discovers that the project has been completed. When Zac goes to the sub-basement where the project runs for that location, he finally sees someone, Perrin, sitting at the controls of Project Flashlight. When he turns the chair around, it’s obvious that Perrin has seen better days.

When Perrin’s body falls forward onto the controls, the facility goes into lockdown for fear of radiation contamination. Zac uses canisters of gases and a torch to blow open the lab’s lockdown doors. While he waits for the explosion, he listens to a tape recording that indicates that Project Flashlight was likely doomed from the beginning. Whatever it was they were doing, they weren’t being fully briefed on everything about the project as if Delenco was specifically withholding important information deliberately. Zac records a message that it is July 5, he concludes there was a malfunction in Project Flashlight leading to devastating results, he is the only human being left on Earth, Perrin has been killed, and he set up the gas explosion to be able to get out of the locked room.

The explosion works and he is freed from the lab. Over the next several days, Zac paints signs on how he can be contacted. He also broadcasts the information on the radio. He even commandeers a cop car to use the loudspeaker to try to find anyone. He has no luck. His mental state starts to go downhill. Interestingly, when he finally breaks over the loneliness, he throws a bottle of booze at the wall, striking the clock, showing it is 6:12 once again.

Zac decides he needs to move up in the world and moves into an abandoned mansion where he drinks a raw egg in champagne to toast his newfound wealth. While there are wonders to being alone, like having all resources available to you right now without needing to worry about paying for it, living the lap of luxury in a mansion, and driving a car around the inside of a shopping mall, being the only person on the planet ultimately leads to another issue… Lack of human intimacy and companionship.

As Zac goes through the closets in the mansion, he discovers the closet of the former lady of the house. The scent and feel of the women’s clothes makes him realize a few things… First, he is alone. Second, there are no longer any of the old norms, so he might as well try on one of her dresses to see how they felt and what they look like on him. Of course, it’s not so much him wanting to dress in women’s clothing, it’s more the loss of that other side of life – the feminine. You can tell he’s had his fun, but the quiet is beginning to really get to him.

When you think he plans to kill himself, he decides that he wants to rule the world instead. So he sets up a dictator-style platform on the balcony of the house where he speaks to various cardboard cutouts of VIPs like Hitler, Nixon, Queen Elizabeth II, and Bob Marley. He’s got flood lamps that point down into the lawn where the cardboard cutouts are. He’s got audio recordings that blare over loudspeakers with an audience cheering. He’s got that great balcony.

But what he’s telling the cardboard cutouts is more than just the ramblings of a man slowly going crazy. He talks about how he is a scientist who took all his knowledge and everything he could do and used it to work on things that could be perverted to do terribly evil things. He was swayed to work on these things by the words that can so often sway the most principled scientist – “But it would be for the common good…” Since his knowledge and scientific breakthroughs were put into the hands of madmen, he realizes he has been made the President of this Quiet Earth. Then, the power finally goes out and the world goes quiet and dark.

With the world an even sadder place for Zac, he finally goes nuts. He busts into a church with a shotgun demanding God show himself or he’ll shoot “the kid”. He then shoots Jesus off a crucifix and says he is now God. He begins to ride around town in a bulldozer to create more havoc and wreckage, but after running over an empty baby stroller, he finally has had enough. He puts his shotgun into his mouth to kill himself but decides to not pull the trigger. Instead, he opts to carry on.

He raids a hardware store for some gardening tools. He downgrades to a much more modest home that he can power with a generator. He even uses his scientific knowledge to build a radio-controlled lawnmower. As he reviews some readings about the Earth from a computer he’s set up, he discovers things are generally normal, except that the UV seems to be up, but he’s not terribly concerned about that. So, nah, nothing to worry about or be shocked by with any of that. That said… the big shock comes when he suddenly hears something behind him…

A young woman with a gun.

This is Joanne. She tells him it’s not a real gun. When she comes into the home, the two embrace saying how great it is to finally see someone. She explains what happened to her on July 5. She was with her sister that morning and then her sister was gone. Just like that. She stayed put for a few weeks but then decided to move on. When Zac says that must have made her crazy, she comments that she didn’t call herself the president of the world. I’m not sure if that means she’s been watching him or if he revealed that as part of his story to her. Either way, the two of them are very glad to know there is at least someone else around.

But that’s not all Joanne says. She talked about walking through the hospital when it was dark, presumably after the power finally gave out. She found the body of a baby. She said she didn’t get a long look at it because of the maggots and all (she says that pretty casually, mind you). Zac thinks that the baby must have died before “The Event” as he calls it. She said that the Event was three weeks ago. The baby hadn’t been dead quite that long.

After Joanne falls asleep, Zac goes through a hypothesis… He says something is different. He can’t put his finger on it completely, but he says that reality has shifted. Things seem normal, but… off. He wonders if they are actually dead and they exist in some sort of purgatory. Zac is attracted to Joanne, but he also thinks she’s not much more than a child.

Later, Zac and Joanne find the remnants of a car accident with two dead bodies. A woman lying outside her vehicle was clutching a radio as if she was calling for help. While neither have maggots, both had to have been alive after the Effect. Joanne is determined to find other survivors, but Zac is doubtful they can find anyone.

While Joanne continues to search for survivors, Zac goes to the university to use some of the school of science’s equipment. Something strange happens to both of them on this particular day. The world starts to get fuzzy and looks like it is shifting again like it did on July 5. Zac says that what Delenco was doing was trying to build a global energy network. He’s not sure how it could have caused the Effect. He chalks it up to God simply blinking. Joanne is devastated to think that God would have wiped out the human race. Soon, the pair begin sleeping together.

It’s important to understand there is a fairly major rift between Joanne and Zac. Sure, they like each other. Sure, I could say their rift is their perceived age difference. However, what I’m actually referring to is the fact that Joanne is rather dogged in trying to find others who didn’t disappear after the Effect. Meanwhile, Zac is more interested in what happened and what the world is like now than he is in finding others. This could be heightened by the fact that he is now sleeping with a very cute redhead who is quite young and flirty and kind of representative of a lot of male fantasies. Plus, come on… Zac thought he was going to be the only living thing left a couple weeks ago. He wasn’t in a good place.

Zac is seemingly sedimentary in his thinking. Like I said, he seems more concerned with studying what happened and what the after-effects are, no pun intended. He comes off as being perfectly fine living in Eden with his Eve. In fact, he was fine with that after he kind of shook off his insanity just before she arrived. Joanne, on the other hand, was with someone with the Effect took place. She was with her sister. She has a more deeply rooted connection to humanity as a whole than Zac, despite what we find out later about how Zac survived the Effect.

It makes her a warmer person than Zac. It’s even found in how the two characters dress with Zac tending to wear grays, blacks, and whites while Joanne wears much brighter clothing. She’s vibrant and loves the idea of connection. Zac’s less-than-enthusiastic opinion of humanity was on display when he was investigating the emptiness of towns, cities, and his workplace on the morning of July 5. He wasn’t searching for bodies. He was trying to sort out why things were the way they were just without people. Sure, he attempted to call out for people on CB radios and wanted people to find him, but he came to the conclusion he was alone fairly quickly and worked through his process. Joanne refuses to believe they were the last two and wants to search until she finds community again.

So Joanne is continuing to search for people while Zac pretends to search for people but is doing more scientific investigation or study. When they finish that day, she wants to move onto the next town/city. He wants to go home. He just wants to live the rest of his life with Joanne and keep an eye on what happened to Earth post-Effect. She’s not letting it go as easy.

But through this research, Zac has discovered something that is boggling his mind. One of the constants that has never changed throughout all of scientific study, and, quite frankly, a universal constant that should forever remain as such for all of time, has changed. He’s discovered that the properties of electrons have not only changed but have become unstable. The fabric of the universe itself is destabilizing little by little.

After their latest search yielded nothing in terms of survivors, Zac goes to pick Joanne up from where she last radioed him. He soon discovers there are trucks and cars positioned in a way to lure him into a trap. When Zac is boxed in an alley by a military vehicle, he investigates only to find a Maori man named Api. Api asks Zac if he’s alone and if he’s seen anyone else. The tension is broken when Api shows his face until Joanne radios Zac causing Api to fear there is a whole group that could be dangerous to him.

Api forces Zac to take him to where Joanne is. When Joanne and Zac embrace, Api reveals himself. He drops his gun and the three embrace, but… Well, never say cinematography and choices made in shooting a scene isn’t, like, super important. Allow me to explain…

The moment Joanne sees Api, she is almost rapt by the man. She steps away from her embrace with Zac by quite a large number of feet. This gives Api the opportunity to step in and position himself between the two lovers forming a three-sided shape known to anyone older than, say, 2 years old as a triangle. His first look at Joanne is one of attraction. Her look is very similar. It could be that she is simply happy to see someone else after searching for so long, but… Yeah. She seemed really excited.

That night, they have a little cookout. Apparently, there are fish to be caught and eaten. How? Joanne explains it quite well. You see, the female fish will lay the eggs and the male fish will come along later and fertilize them. This would happen before the Effect. So, there would be fish. Makes perfect sense. While they talk about their experiences and what happened when the Effect happened, something starts to become clear.

Api was in a fight with a guy and he was thrown into the water by his attacker. He was being strangled underwater and was on the very edge of death when the Effect happened. In fact, he saw it through an out-of-body experience. He saw a red light off in the distance that he wanted to reach but couldn’t. He then woke up. Joanne had a similar near-death experience with a faulty hairdryer after her shower. Zac was unhappy with his life and working on Project Flashlight and took a deliberate overdose of pills to kill himself. So survival of the Effect came due to being on the very verge of death.

As they enjoy some song and dance, Zac tells Joanne that for being the guy who was very happy with being alone, that all changed with her. She tells Zac that she isn’t just thinking of him and her anymore, but also Api. When the trio’s spirits fade a little bit when Api performs “Auld Lang Syne”, it’s clear this situation isn’t going to be as satisfactory as it would appear.

Zac noticed a few days back that the sun has been flickering. Joanne hadn’t noticed but his instruments have confirmed this. He figures that the oscillations in the sun have increased. This means that the sun will collapse in a few days. Meanwhile, Joanne talks with Api about how she thinks most people decide they like someone. She figures people decide if they like someone within a few minutes of meeting them. If they decide to stick it out with the person, they will find good things in the bad things they do and say while if they want out of that relationship, they will find bad things in all the good things they do. It seems as though she’s telling Api that she’s ready to change things up with who she likes. So she asks him why his friend was trying to kill him. Api reveals he killed that friend’s wife. When she asks why, he simply responds it was necessary. Shocked, she ponders who the next person he will find necessary to kill.

Shit has completely hit the fan and it happened pretty much as quickly and unexpectedly as the makeup of the universe has changed. Joanne is crying over having fallen in love with Api but finding out that he “played god” by killing a man’s wife for no more reason than him saying it was necessary that he did so. Zac needs to find a place to study the research he’s done to find out when the sun will collapse. Api thinks Zac wanting to leave is due to him not liking his place (which is a Maori museum). Zac thinks Api did something to Joanne, but Zac and Abi have a miscommunication which leads to Api wanting to kill Zac, which he reveals to Joanne by telling her he’s working on becoming “the last man on Earth.”

Zac and Api engage in a high-speed car chase with Joanne in pursuit to stop them. Zac left his tape recorder with Api who hears about Project Flashlight. Zac reveals that for a year, he worried about what the project was and how he was helping it come to fruition. It was then he opted to try to kill himself over the guilt of never speaking up about the possible threat. But the thing is, Zac believes the project is still running which means it’s possible to shut it off and stop all this weirdo astrophysical stuff that’s happening. After explaining himself to Api and Joanne, the trio come back together on uneasy footing.

Meanwhile, it’s kind of funny and sort of hot that Joanne arrives with a giant machine gun and is willing to kill one of the guys because she refuses to live with two men who think of themselves as gods. Zac did the science stuff that caused her entire existence to change in an instant and Api is seemingly perfectly fine with playing with another’s life and ending it over what he deems is necessary. She didn’t even care which one she killed. She just is so over both of these dudes.

Zac gets to a computer and analyzes the data he has collected. He expects another fluctuation in the sun to happen at 6am tomorrow morning. He thinks the Effect will happen again. When he says that, the universe wobbles and suddenly Joanne is the only one at the computer. They can’t find each other for a moment, but when it passes, Zac says that it was just a tremor.

Api has an idea… If the grid that Project Flashlight created is still running and causing all these troubles, knocking out the Delenco facility that Zac worked at should destabilize the network and cause the grid to fail. Zac agrees. So they get a whole shitload of gelignite and plan to bring down the grid. On the way to the facility, Zac and Joanne talk about what happens if this works. He suggests they will all live happily ever after. She says it kind of has to. Besides, it’s easy for her because she likes both Zac and Api. Zac knows she prefers Api and he’s long felt that the two of them have, in a way, known each other for a long time. Joanne reveals the full truth about Api killing his friend’s wife. Api rejected his friend’s wife who had fallen in love with him, so she killed herself. His friend and Api both felt Api was responsible. Zac realizes how sad that is and kind of feels as though he is serving some sort of penance for his part in Project Flashlight, thus tying back to his pondering if he’s actually dead and in purgatory. He also ponders if Joanne and Api were sent to be his guardians and have been in league this whole time to help him.

The trio drives into town after a harrowing incident with that tanker from earlier that was in the way. There is a problem, though… The plant is giving off a bunch of radioactive energy. This means they need to remote control the truck with the explosives in. They wouldn’t be able to survive the stuff. Zac drives off back to the city to get a remote control device to drive the truck in.

While Zac’s gone, Api and Joanne go to Pound Town. Once they finish, Api tells Joanne he’s going to take the truck and sacrifice himself, believing Zac’s remote control won’t work. They hear the truck driving down the road and discover that Zac is driving the truck himself. He didn’t go to get the remote control at all. Api and Joanne watch as Zac sacrifices himself and drives the tanker into the facility and triggers the explosions. Following the explosion, the red light is seen again as if the Effect happened all over again.

We then find Zac on the beach. Strange clouds fill the sky. He still has his recorder. He gazes out to the horizon and watches as a large ringed planet rises in the sky while the credits roll over the haunting scene and most popular image from the film.

This final image is left purposely vague as to what its meaning was. Frankly, I’m not so sure it’s all that vague. The final minute of the runtime is a freeze frame on Zac’s face as he sees this planet in the distance. It’s one of disbelief with a little dash of terror. I mentioned earlier that Zac felt he was in purgatory when he thought he was all alone. The producer of the film, Sam Pillsbury, had a fairly simple read. What happened is exactly what we saw. The explosion and subsequent second Effect killed Zac and he’s trapped in a transdimensional purgatory forced to have to go through all this again until he has appropriately corrected his karma and finally be released from his own guilt. Pillsbury knew Geoff Murphy grew up Catholic so it was very likely he was playing with purgatory as a concept.

I like that. I also like the idea that perhaps all of this was a Jacob’s Ladder sort of scenario. He killed himself with the pills and in his final moments of life, his guilt, his scientific theories, the presence of two “guardian angels” of sorts, and the concerns he felt over the power of this grid made all this real to him. In the end, he is in some sort of personal hell of his own creation for those final moments of his life that feel like an eternity.

I do suppose that last bit brings us back to the whole purgatory thing.

Anyway, The Quiet Earth is a fantastic film. It’s an excellent example of how science fiction does not require aliens or spaceships or laser guns. It deals with all sorts of stuff from man playing god to scientific advancement being our own undoing to relationships to the fear of being alone. It’s all ideas we recognize but made into this wonderful sci-fi package that is engrossing and, at times, beautiful.

Bruno Lawrence is amazing in this. He has all the range. A little later this summer, we’ll see Bruno Lawrence on B-Movie Enema: The Series when I watch the fantastic Warlords of the 21st Century (aka Battletruck). He’s good in that too. Pete Smith as Api is pretty good. He comes in during the final act so he has less to carry than Lawrence, but he’s got a good look to him. He would go on to be in a lot of great films like The Piano and The Lord of the Rings films. Sadly Smith passed away a couple years ago. Alison Routledge plays the lovely Joanne. Interestingly, Routledge didn’t have that big of a career. She ultimately retired from acting in 2005.

That said, Routledge did have a big part in this movie. Joanne’s the humanity of the film. She’s the most in need of finding others. She brings Zac out of his bubble. She pushes back against Api’s perceived masculinity when he comes off as being a threat in terms of being violent. I likened Joanne to being Eve and she really kind of is. When the truth of Api comes out, Zac realizes he is a good man. He realizes at that point that Api is the better match for Joanne even if Api was willing to sacrifice himself to fix the universe.

I definitely recommend The Quiet Earth. I also recommend you check out tomorrow’s episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series. This week, Nurse Disembudee and I are watching the animated feature Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned. The movie ain’t that great, but I get to talk about comic books through pretty much all of the episode, so… check it out! Next week, Quly comes to a close with a stinker, but one that might be kind of significant in what kind of a parody it is. Join me for a review of Queen Kong.

See you on the other side of the Effect.