By the time the late Seventies
rolled around in all their flared paisley glory, Kirk Douglas had already
headlined such movie classics as The
Gunfight at the OK Corrall, The Vikings and, of course, Spartacus. But
the tides of popular taste were changing, and historical epics had been
replaced by glossy supernatural horrors like The Exorcist and Rosemary’s
Baby. Sadly for Kirk, his attempt to ride the bandwagon involved signing
up for this ludicrous Anglo-Italian schlocker, which ripped off The Omen
by combining gory satanic shenanigans with the prevailing nuclear paranoia
of the era.
Douglas stars as industrialist Robert Caine, a visionary businessman
with a wonderful idea. He’s going to build a nuclear reactor on
a holy site in the Middle East. Why, what could possibly go wrong with
such a nifty plan?
Well, for a start the reactor proves to be the leviathan of Biblical
prophecy, a ten-headed monster which will kickstart the end of the world
in a baptism of fire. Naturally, this technological beast needs an infernal
master in the form of the Anti-Christ and anybody who tries to get in
the way of the reactor project finds themselves bumped off in lurid ways.
First to go is Caine’s wife, the mother to Angel, his effeminate
and creepy adult son. During a function to celebrate the launch of the
project, she reveals to Caine that she plans to use her controlling shares
in his company to block construction. Moments later, and she’s
been stabbed by a wild-eyed Arab assassin who simply wanders into this
high powered function brandishing a knife.
Visiting the assassin in a remarkably avant garde asylum – the
patients are all locked in a big glass room together – Caine is
told that from his seed will come great evil. The assassin then slashes
his own wrists, and bashes his brains out on the glass wall. Angel has
now joined his father at the helm of the project, but another obstacle
arises. The prime minister of the country where the reactor is to be
built has been replaced by a hardliner who refuses point blank to allow
construction to begin. Sure enough, he soon has the top of his head sliced
off by a helicopter.
Keen to reassure people that the experimental reactor will be safe, Caine
asks Nobel Prize winner Dr. Griffith to double check the computer systems.
While doing this, the quaintly archaic piece of kit spits out a seemingly
random equation. As Caine ponders this curious conundrum on a plane,
a convenient priest sees the equation backwards through the paper and
reveals that the reversed digital numerals sort of spell IESUS, if you
squint a bit. “The
name of Jesus backwards is the sign of the Anti-Christ” the priest
helpfully explains over brandy and cigars later.
Caine is starting to twig that there might be something evil about his
reactor, but he’s distracted by the tender attentions of Sara,
a strangely pointless woman who has been drifting in and out of the story
as some sort of official government photographer working for the decapitated
prime minister.
Griffith works out the equation and, for reasons best known to himself,
checks the resulting figure against the company medical database. What
he discovers shocks him to his core, and he phones Caine immediately.
We’re not allowed to see what he’s found, because that would
spoil the crap twist at the end, and nor does Caine get to discover what
the ballyhoo is all about. The phone call is cut off just after Griffith
warns that Caine has “generated something not human”.
Right
on cue, Sara announces that she’s pregnant.
It’s this that helps Caine finally understand that dark forces
are at work, and we’re treated to a lengthy nightmare sequence
in which a naked Kirk Douglas, with his leathery ass and balls proudly
on display, staggers around an enormous salt flat, following the robed
figure of his would-be assassin and gasping in naked horror as his reactor
rises from the sea via the magic of piss-poor rear projection, and then
transforms into a seven-headed silver dragon.
Convinced his new child will grow up and use his reactor to destroy the
world, Caine tries to trick Sara into having an abortion. After she somewhat
understandably flees at great speed from her increasingly demented lover,
Caine follows Griffith’s methodology and enters the equation into
the computer. The answer comes back – Angel is the evil one, a
twist that has been apparent since roughly ten seconds after he first
appeared on screen. And worse, he’s taken his mentally erratic
father’s place at the head of the company. Can nothing stop the
rise of this effeminate Anti-Christ?
Caine attacks Angel and is carted off to the nuthouse for his trouble.
It’s the same nuthouse from before, and the security is as lax
as ever. As he lies alone, strapped to a gurney in a straitjacket, Caine’s
tenacious Arab assassin (apparently none the worse for wear following
his slashed wrists/gory head injury) wheels the helpless tycoon into
a padded cell and sets all the other inmates loose on him. With his straitjacket
torn off, Caine gruesomely smashes the assassins head open (again) and
heads off to find Sara, who is about to give birth - even though she
seemingly only announced her pregnancy a few days ago. The bloodied Caine
rescues her and their newborn daughter from the hospital just before
yet another satanic mishap polishes off every other child on the maternity
ward. Mmm, tasteful.
Meanwhile, just to make sure you’re still paying attention, the
priest (remember him?) boards a plane by pretending to be Caine and promptly
explodes.
Sara, Caine and their little girl decamp to what looks like the Middle
East, but a barrage of cheap overdubbed flashbacks to everything that
has happened leaves poor Caine looking pensive. He flies to Geneva, where
Angel is about to seal the reactor deal once and for all, lines his jacket
with dynamite and blows himself, his Anti-Christ offspring and several
bewildered businessmen to smithereens, thus saving the entire planet.
As you’ve no doubt realised, Holocaust 2000 is a truly awful film,
stuffed full of impenetrable convoluted plotting, baffling narrative
swerves and cheap splatter effects. Of course, Douglas weathers this
storm of
gruesome
occult bullshit with his usual stone-faced determination. Proving himself
to be a true Hollywood trooper, Douglas manages to make the most of his
laughably nonsensical role - even when being manhandled by maniacs, flashing
his little Douglas in the utterly random dream sequence or being forced
to deliver classic lines like “Stop talking like a ridiculous prophet
of the apocalypse!” We don’t get to see his face as he detonates
his torso, but it’s a fair bet there was a look of sheer relief
as his atoms were thrust asunder.
Honourable mention: Following Holocaust 2000, the late Seventies and
early Eighties were something of a barren period for the mighty Kirk
Douglas. Other cult oddities from that period include The Fury, the Brian
De Palma psychokinesis horror that isn’t Carrie; space thriller
Saturn 3 (see: Harvey Keitel), in which Kirk romps with Farah Fawcett
and is menaced by a psycho robot; and The Final Countdown, sadly not
a movie version of Europe’s cheese-rock anthem but a bizarrely
uneventful sci-fi tale about a US aircraft carrier transported back in
time to the day before Pearl Harbor. Douglas starred as the captain of
the temporally adrift vessel, with Martin
Sheen as a civilian observer.
A rather curious little film, it was made with the blessing of the US
Navy, which probably explains why there’s more time spent on lengthy
sequences of really cool fighter planes taking off and landing than spent
on anything resembling a story.
Availability: Holocaust 2000 (aka Rain of Fire) is absent from both video
and DVD shelves around the world, while second hand copies are disappointingly
scarce.
