Cataclysm (a.k.a The Nightmare Never Ends)

Cataclysm is a low-down and seriously low-budget, ultra-threadbare horror-occult supernatural thriller with the late Richard Moll and the late Cameron Mitchell—both heavyweights of the bad horror flick genre of the 1980s. In Moll’s case, he seems to have been in every bad movie, horror or otherwise, between 1980 and, say, 1986. Here, though, he seems to have hair, unlike in his role as the famously bald Bull Shannon on the classic Eighties sitcom "Night Court".

Mitchell (“Lt. Sterne”) plays a stereotypical 1980s TV-cop-show cop, with a lot of turbulence burbling beneath the surface, making you realize he probably drank whiskey and Mylanta in equal measure. He lives across the hall from an old Jewish man, Weiss (Marc Lawrence), who gives a very bizarre performance, seemingly unable to speak a word of intelligible dialogue. He does, however, gesticulate and grunt very well, in a manner that is unintentionally humorous.

That said, there is still something oddly haunting about the character, as he lives in a down-at-the-heels apartment with newspaper clippings of escaped Nazis taped to the wall. It’s a stark, dark little place that reeks of decay and loneliness—and Mitchell enters, as a cop, because the old Nazi hunter wants to arrest “Mr. Olivier.”

Mr. Olivier (Robert Bristol, whose only other credit seems to have been the Eighties UFO classic Hangar 18) is a disco-loving hipster with a Hefner-level bevy of beyotches at his beck and call, who vaguely resembles, I don’t know, a young, utterly demonic David Cassidy, maybe. At any rate, we flash back to a scene in limbo with Nazis dining in 1943, wherein Mr. Cassidy comes in, informs them they “haven’t met their quota this week,” and then machine-guns the strange Jewish chamber orchestra, all of whom are dressed in white dinner jackets.

He’s an eternal demon who never ages. That’s the lynchpin.

Richard Moll (“Dr. Hansen”) is a kind of 1980s Richard Dawkins, and he has a book called God Is Dead—shades of Nietzsche—with the Bad Religion “no crosses” logo on it. He goes on TV and says things like:

“I propose to build a culture upon the premise that God is dead. For my part, He never existed. And if the Christian God is dead, so it is with all other gods. There is no supreme being. We are alone. There is no god to help us. So let us build our own paradise.”

Papini (Maurice Grandmaison), an Italian priest who seems to have wandered in from an old Omen movie, comes to Moll and, in another of a seemingly endless series of scenes of unintentional cringe, rips open his trench coat like a mad flasher to reveal a triskelion tattoo of three sixes on his skin, for some reason.

There are some spooky, underlit scenes of wife Helen (the weirdly wooden Faith Clift) climbing the stairs and being tormented in sleep by demons, but we don’t see nearly as much impressive 1980s special makeup effects as we did when this film was cut into the excretable “anthology” howler Night Train to Terror.

That film featured stop-motion effects reshot for this particular segment. And, you know, seeing claymation demons walking across a Heavy Metal hellscape in a 1984 gutter flick reminds me that the Satanic Panic really were the good old days of BAD.

And this film, by the way, is not all bad. It isn’t conventionally good—dialogue and performances seem to have been hand-crafted and carved from solid wood, even for Moll and Mitchell, who do their best with what they have here. But, having said that, you can’t deny a certain eerie, if absurd, fever-dream ambience to the scenes, even if they come off as having been edited with meat cleavers by someone on bennies with an IQ barely scraping one hundred.

By the way, it took three directors—Phillip Marshak, Tom McGowan, and Gregg G. Tallas—to compose this masterwork. It took Philip Yordan to write it. Yordan, who had a long Hollywood career, was likewise curiously responsible for foisting Night Train to Terror upon the world. Cataclysm was part of Night Train, or rather became part of it. And only the Devil knows why.

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