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Cataclysm (1980) aka "The Nightmare Never Ends"

Dir: Philip Marshak/Tom McGowan/Gregg C. Tallas

Claire Hanson (Faith Clift) is having strange and sinister nightmares.
Her Husband, James Hanson (Richard Moll), who is a Noble Prize winning author of a sceptical novel called "God is Dead", decides to take off to Las Vegas so they can relax.

In Vegas Claire is put under by a stage hypnotist and has a vision of a group of Nazi's in a darkened room having a banquet.
An SS Officer comes in (with hysterically over the top eyebrows, obviously to try and make him look evil), rebukes the men for not "Filling their quota" and proceeds to machinegun down some female prisoners…."Your Quota is now filled".

When Claire goes backstage to tell the hypnotist about her vision he reluctantly agrees to help her.
But later he is mysteriously killed, leaving only the name of the Demon 'Molock' (one of Satan's generals) written in spilt make-up powder on his dressing room table!

We then go to an Abraham Weiss, who is an ageing Jewish Nazi Hunter, and while watching coverage on his TV of a concert to his horror spots a man he recognises as a death camp SS Officer (the same SS Officer seen in Claire's visions,) but he has not aged.
He calls in the sceptical Police Lt. Sterne (Cameron Michell "The Toolbox Murders") but seeing as the Officer, now a rich playboy called Olivier (Robert Bristol) looks in his 20's he refutes it can be the same man and refuses to take any action.
Frustrated, Weiss takes things into his own hands but is killed by a strange beast!

It turns out the mysterious Olivier is the demonic head of a Satanic Cult trying to destroy Man's faith in God, but is it too late for Claire and the now driven Lt. Sterne to do anything……..

 

Low on real thrills (and gore for the most part, more later) this low budget movie may be (though it does have it's moments, especially during the finale) but "Cataclysm" does have a very well crafted idea that provides some genuine tension and mystery, and the movie provides an effectively morbid atmosphere throughout it's running time.
The script (Oscar winning scribe Philip Yordan of all people) also tries to cover the complex reasoning of whether God exists and people's faith (or lack of) in that existence, so the film at least tries to be more complex and thoughtful than many low budget fright fests bother to be.

But the plot is very messily handled with many characters simply popping up from nowhere only to be killed off two scenes later in a disjointed (badly edited…or censored?) death sequence and the sub plot involving Moll and his novel, though part of the plot's coverage of the power of Man's faith on God, is quite frankly dull for too much of the time and is ultimately sidelined anyway.
Things of importance are thrown away too. The link to Claire's nightmares id never really explained, after Weiss's death we learn from Claire that he had sent her a letter, yet we learn nothing of this or how he even knew about her. And the brief appearance (again from nowhere) and disappearance of Claire's Nephew is also confusingly handled.
It seems obvious that the film had some major creative turmoil along the way, as the existence of three Directors shows!

A real low point of the entire enterprise is the acting.
Moll seems all at sea when not under latex. His turn in "The Sword and Sorcerer" (as the hideous Sorcerer of the title) for example is great and uses his strong voice perfectly. In "Cataclysm" he's simply a non-entity.
Mitchell (who appeared in dozens of low budget schlock horror and Trash flicks after struggling to get the kind of high profile work and popularity his long term gig on "The High Chaparral" gave him) rarely reaches anything past enjoyable ham and his character is simply a glorified support act.
The weird but striking Robert Bristol is suitably arrogant and cruel but he looks and sounds dubbed over. Whether it's a bud post-synch job on his voice or another actor dubbed over entirely I can't say, but the voice does sound like an older man.
The real villain here though is Faith Clift who is downright awful and barely crawls past the emotional level of a tree trunk. She is truly abominable!

The score by Steve Yeaman and Casey Young has some excellent moments and has some creepy choral passages, but the less said about the Disco bop pop the better. But it does at least provide an unexpected bit of weird awfulness when a spaced out Mitchell starts whooping it up on the dance floor!
The film in fact goes out of it's way to be just plain weird at times, another good example being when a couple of Satanic Native American Indians make an appearance!

The visual effects during the nightmares are cheap and crude, as is the highly dubious crocodile/lizard 'beast', but some of the jump scares in them are well timed and the cheapness does add a suitably bizarre feel to them.
And the unveiling of Olivier's feet is a gem!

Now on to what is perhaps the weirdest thing about this weird film. The gore.
As mentioned above, I have no idea if this was cut, but it actually goes out of it's way not to show gory sights (like a man's supposedly torn off face when it's uncovered in the morgue) when it easily could have done.
And yet it goes completely mad on the red stuff during the finale!
This frenzied, gore drenched conclusion, with real life operation footage spliced in (a point which makes you wonder how this was not picked up in the UK 'Video Nasty' fuss, especially considering it's wonderfully over the top video artwork), delivers the violent energy and visceral shocks, that the rest of the film has pulled away from, in spades.
It's a real messy joy and makes sure the end of film ends on a moist and dripping high.

So it's a case of a film that is a better watch, as a whole, than some of it's parts would make you think it should be.
It's script is engaging but very messy and confusing, the editing is shot to hell, and the acting mostly lousy. But some of the set pieces are suitably creepy and doom laden and it has a ball's to the wall splatter finale that is pleasure to watch.
So a very mixed bag indeed, but worth a look if you're feeling in an adventurous mood.

Note: Footage of "Cataclysm" later ended up (along with footage from 2 other films) in a bizarre counterfeit 'Anthology' film called "Night Train to Terror".