Further problematic is that my parents are into horror movies, but they don't actually own any. They're renters. This would explain why I'm a duper: I have a desire to acquire but I also inherited their disdain for payin'... not to be confused with my disdain for Palin... Anyway, occasionally they do get some discs from the cheap-o bins, so I uncovered a dollar double-feature for Vinnie Price's classic The Last Man On Earth and today's flick: Roger Corman's The Last Woman On Earth... oddly enough, NOT a sequel to the former... then again, LWOE was made 4 years prior, so I guess it's not so odd after all. Meh.

Harold Gern is an American not-so-legitimate businessman from the Big Scrapple. His wife Evelyn is the standard issue neglected trophy wife that usually comes as an accessory to the typical not-so-legitimate business man figure... along with the spring-loaded harpoon gun, interchangeable fish mutant head, and kung-fu grip accessories. Martin Joyce is Harold's lawyer/sidekick, there to keep Harold out of jail for any and all wrong-doings. He's no Phoenix Wrigth, or even a Harvey Birdman, but he does come with a detachable Harvard law degree and subpoena serving action! OBJECTION! APPEAL! YOU JUST GOT ADJOURNED, BITCH! Anyway, while the trio is down in Puerto Rico taking in the cockfights, casinos, and pina coladas, Harold's neglect of his dearly beloved (and subsequent implied menage-a-trois with a pair of bar tramps) pushes her into the interest of young Mr. Martin. Before anything especially "juicy" can happen the three go SCUBA diving... and Ev nicks Marty with a harpoon gun! As they surface to seek medical attention for the lad, they swim head first into a wall of stink, like walking into the bathroom after your grandpa has evacuated the refried bean casserole from his Thanksgiving dinner. Reapplying their mouthpieces the three make it back to their boat, only to discover that the local hombre captaining it has croaked in their absence. Making their way back to dry land, it turns out that everybody else is dead, hence the title of the movie. So they aren't forced to spend the rest of the movie sucking clean O2 from a tank, whatever stank up the air (my guess? The collective "death release" of every bowel in Puerto Rico) is soon gone and the air is breathable again. Good thing too, cuz I'm not so sure even Roger Corman could make a movie where three people talk through SCUBA 'pieces for 87 minutes something even I would be willing to sit through.

Packing up their things (and all the booze and cash from the hotel that they can carry), the three drive out to a luxurious little villa now formerly owned by one of Harry's local associates. They figure since it's on the edge of the island it'll be far enough away from the city that when the bodies really start to stink it won't hit them so badly... unless they're downwind... By the start of the first morning after we can already see where the presumably global holocaust is going to take each of our three survivors as Harry tries to encourage denial about the scope of the situation, Marty goes all doom and gloom about it, and Evelyn just opts for a cocktail of feminine defiance and some slight dementia. Call me crazy, but based on personal experiences with groups of drunken, emotionally confused people, I don't think the bottles of booze Harry brought along are gonna help the situation much. Continue calling me crazy, but when you put two men and a woman in a house together for a long period of time, wedding vows or not there's gonna be sexual tension out the wazoo... or into the wazoo depending on how freaky the woman in question likes to get.

Speaking of men and women, I have a message for the AXE users reading this. First, congratulations. Most AXE users can't read and you've broken the glass ceiling. Way to go Willy Wonka, your magical elevator works. Second, stop using AXE. If skeevy, used up, trollop cast-offs from a Girls Gone Wild DVD do come onto you, it's not because you smell like a pile of "prairie oysters" that have been baking in the dessert sun all week. No, it's because their blood-alcohol is higher than their IQ and they're so stacked with STDs and dripping with other peoples' cloudy discharges that they have no realistic prospects for any kind of worthwhile relationship. All you gotta do is pay attention to 'em and you're guaranteed some action... and the infections that come with it that you so rightly deserve. So stop encouraging AXE to make more vomit inducing “products” by drenching yourself in their crap and just stand outside of a bar some Friday night at 3am. You'll definitely find somebody willing to paint your pole in half-digested hot wings and you won't need to promote the chemical sodomizing of the ozone layer while you're doing so! And now, back to our regularly scheduled movie review.

Unafraid that whatever killed the rest of the population is contagious, our folks take up fishing as a source of fresh food. If all air-breathing life suddenly dropped dead tomorrow, the only thing I'd be eating would come with pictures of Chef Boyardee on the labels. Granted, I'd no doubt die from the drastically elevated levels of sodium and sugar in my blood within a week's time, but I'd die with a belly (and colon) full of heavily processed ravioli! Mmmmmm, beefy! While Harry and Marty work on a plan to leave the island for fear of tropical diseases and insect infestations (not to mention hurricanes...), the topic of Evelyn comes up and Harry stands firm in the "she's my wife, so keep your dirty hands off of her" position. Marty's not too happy that his "buddy" isn't willing to share his toys in a world where their marriage certificate means as much as any other sheet of paper (i.e. as ass wipe). As for Ev, she tries to reason with Harry that she needs to make her own choices, to which he forcibly reminds her, "You're MY wife!" before pinning her to the bed. Unless Ev turns into a total '50s housewife devoid of any and all ability to make decisions of her own, and unless Marty turns to necrophilia, this is only going to get worse... or they could just give Harry the old "harpoon to the face" trick and solve both their problems. Personally, I don't see what's to fight over. If the guy's are too homophobic to fingercuff/double-p the young lady, then just take turns! They could work out a rotating schedule on who gets what hole on what day of the week. It's about sharing folks. Don't be greedy, just get seedy! Morality and "social limits" have no meaning when there's nobody left to judge you. Why do you think I opted to become a hermit?

When Ev realizes that she can kick sand in Marty's face, treat him like a bitch and be the one in charge for once, she starts to embrace the possibility of having the lawyer under her heel... at least after a few brewskies and excessive sun exposure. The progression of male egos eventually leads the boys' conflict to blows. Instead of throwing haymakers and uppercuts though, these two get into on their little fishing dingie as we watch two grown men slap each other silly with the catch of the day. Wow. There are two perfectly good oars they could be cracking each other in the face with, but they both opt to use the bass as blackjacks instead... It's a moment of movie making genius that you can check out here by jumping ahead to the scene starting at the 1:20 mark in the clip. By far the greatest filmed example of piscine pugilism until the day somebody pays a posse of hobos to beat each other senseless with a crate of frozen catfish. Roger Corman, I wish you were my real father.

After the scuffle, the self-imposed leader of the remainder of humanity "exiles" Marty from their trio, deeming the kid poison to his new world order and not worth the trouble his hormones and lawyer brain bring with him. Ev opts to go with Marty and the two make a run for a yacht they hope to navigate back to the States. Of course you know Harry isn't down with that, so he gives chase. There's more fighting (sadly sans fish this time), a swim chase, and more footage of two guys in soaking wet clothes rolling around together on a beach. As cheesy as it all is, I have to admit that I'm in suspense while waiting to see how it all turns out. That wasn't even me being sarcastic, I honestly don't know what's going to happen!... though I have to admit it's hard to keep from laughing at all the homo-erotic wet t-shirt wrestling these two go through in the process.

In the end, Corman and Towne show us that they support the sanctity of marriage as radical thinking, child hating, free lovin' hippie Marty dies on the floor of a church, a victim of head trauma from his earlier tussle with Harry when the big man clocked his ticker with a rock. Instead of hating Harry for what he's done, or mourning the death of the one man she could've been the boss of, Evelyn decides to up and go home with Harold so they can "talk". And by that, I mean so he can rule over her and make her feel like crap for cheating on him with the only other man on Earth, then get drunk and beat her repeatedly until he either kills her or she gets her hands on enough sleeping pills to kill herself. Great, now the rest of my day's just gonna be a total bummer.

One thing you have to give Corman: even if you don't like his movies the guy knows how to make a budget last. Long before Charles Band was filming back-to-back Puppet Master sequels to stretch his budgets like they were Ron Jeremy's rubbers, Corman set the standard for pinching pennies. Last Woman On Earth was the product of Roger having some free time, some extra film, an exotic locale, and some already paid actors on his hands. Originally in Puerto Rico to shoot Creature From the Haunted Sea, he recycled that movie's three stars and gave Robert Towne (Martin) his first writing credit so he could shoot this movie and head back to the States with a few extra reels! It turned out to be a better effort than most would've imagined too... more so than the movie he was there to shoot in the first place at least.

By focusing on the relationship between our three protagonists, LWOE isn't so much a sci-fi flick as it is a drama. The mysterious super-plague is little more than a plot device to excuse putting three people into an isolated environment and watch as the conflicts boil. It's a precursor to "The Real World". Given the budget friendly theme and the drama that writes itself, I'm surprised this hasn't already been remade or just ripped off. With a little effort and a writer with a little more experience than NOTHING, this could be an indie success. As it stands, it's a pretty lackluster but interesting movie. It doesn't go to the lengths it could, but it did keep my attention, which is still pretty good for a “done in one” flick like this. I still don't know how I feel about the ending, but the last few minutes really would have had me on the edge of my seat... if I hadn't been lying down. The only problem I had wasn't even the lack of explanation as to the phenomena. You've got three people with absolutely no scientific background, so it's perfectly understandable that they wouldn't be trying to find a rhyme or reason behind something like that when their preservation is their only priority. My problem comes from not knowing whether the characters are supposed to be drunk at all times or if that's just the actors playing them. Sure, Harry, Marty, and Ev down more than their fair shares of the creature, but are they constantly drunk or just mentally wiped out? They seem pretty interchangeable. Also, fair warning to all of our animal lovers out there, there's some cockfighting in the opening of the movie. I don't mean it metaphorically either, there's actual rooster-on-rooster violence.

Since the title of the movie is so similar to a common turn down for particularly porcine gents, I thought it appropriate to rattle off a few women I myself wouldn't consort with if they themselves were The Last Woman On Earth. Paris Hilton - though you have to give her credit for somehow making night-vision porn about women with Down Syndrome the momentary beat-off focus for tasteless guys with internet access, if half of the new race of humanity's genetic code is gonna be saturated with "duh duh idiot" DNA, we're better off on the extinction list... which I guess will have to be kept by a race of humanoid dolphin-monkey hybrids after the rest of us are nothing more than rotting maggot hotels. Anne Coulter - Please. The day after all law enforcement is wiped from the Earth, this bitch'll be dead via massive blood loss from every orifice caused by repeated violations with a motel room nightstand Bible. As much as Hilton's DNA strands are held together with scrunchies and chewed Bubble Yum, Coulter's is pure concentrated HATRED. After killing his/her parents, the offspring would eventually have nothing else to hate but itself before beating itself to death with some loose masonry.

Next, Paula Abdul - the only one of the three I think is at least attractive, she's a whole three piece luggage set of raving psychosis. Some guys like the idea of a crazy woman because they think she'll give them bed breaking lunatic lovin'. Paula's not fun-crazy, she's balls out crazy-crazy. She can go from calm to clinically depressed to bloodletting madness before you'd get the condom on. I can't put up with that kind of baggage for twenty minutes let alone twenty years. Once again, mankind would be better off as a bad memory of the animal kingdom than to keep going with that kind of family history... And finally, an entire demographic that should be wiped from the Earth the sooner the better: the cunts on “My Super Sweet Sixteen”. Believe me ladies, I know how severe the 'c' word is for you and trust me when I say that no other group deserves its application more so than the spoiled rich bitches whose shithead parents should have had abortions 16 years prior. While Paris is a twit, Coulter is self-righteous bigot, and Paula is insane, the Sweet 16 crowd live and breath as oxymorons. They're selfish, melodramatic skid marks on the tighty-whiteys of life. Right after the world ends and Coulter's black heart is running Wacky Wall Walker style down the side of the nearest bomb shelter, the Sweet 16ers are getting meathooks in the backs of their skulls so I can drag them around behind a horse. I don't advocate violence against women, but I fully endorse violence against self-absorbed, spoiled little... skip ahead to the next paragraph because here it comes again girls... CUNTS.

I'm not a misogynist ladies, I just know who I hate.