Everybloody’s End – review

Director: Claudio Lattanzi

Release date: 2019

Contains spoilers

This Italian movie’s title is somewhat clunky and I think works better with the original title Crucified – however, the Blu-Ray I have uses the clunkier name. The film actually doesn’t reveal its vampire connection openly until towards the end, despite a feed early on, but this is a vampire apocalypse film… it is also a Dracula related piece.

below throat

The film starts with the setting sun and a woman crossing a field. This is, it is later revealed, a flash back in time. She seems to be wearing a nightdress with corset over it and a robe. She is also being followed by a scarred man in hat and long coat. She reaches a building but is grabbed by him, he rips at her clothes to reveal a tattoo and then stabs her with a blade and takes a railway spike and hammers it into her just below the throat…

post-apocalyptic

The credits roll and after we are “in another era, in another place”. That place is apocalyptic, with broken buildings, skyscrapers in part skeletal (though lights are still functioning in places). In a room Steiner (Giovanni Lombardo Radice, City of the Living Dead & the Reverend) is researching using books and his laptop. Lisa (Marina Loi) comes into the room and Steiner suggests he’s getting close. He’s searching for a location and he thinks he has found it… where, perhaps, he might find the source of the evil that has befallen the world.

Steiner and Lisa

Black clad, face shrouded men enter the building – these are the exterminators, men searching for patient zero and killing anyone and everyone just in case. Steiner tells Lisa to save herself and mentions being able to contact by cell phone (which are also still working). We flick away to a scene of a feed, though as we only see the eyes of the biter and the hair of the bitten it is only with knowledge that this a vampire film that you’d associate it with a feed necessarily. Lisa tries to escape but the exterminators catch her eventually and we see an iron nail about to be hammered into her throat.

Rossa and Nera

At a junkyard full of cars a woman, Rossa (Tania Orlandi), sneaks trying to avoid the exterminators. Said killers radio in to suggest they have located an infected… They eventually catch her and determine to “have some fun” before killing her. A second woman, Nera (Veronica Urban), emerges from the shadows (wearing a cops uniform) and shoots the exterminators (incidentally they must have been the last of her bullets as the gun isn’t fired again). She apologies that she had to use Rossa as bait. They leave and it is morning before they find a building to hold up in. The building has charred remains in and, all too late, they realise a group of exterminators has entered the building but they manage to hide. Eventually they head out and find a bunker below an abandoned warehouse.

Cinzia Monreale as Bionda

Also in there is Steiner and eventually they find another woman, Bionda (Cinzia Monreale), who was also a cop though Nera didn’t know her, and finally Michael (Lorenzo Lepori), a doctor. All the women claim to have been drawn there by dreams. The exterminators are also closing in. So, as we get to the finale, we are expressly told that vampires are the issue and Steiner is actually a Van Helsing and descended from the scarred man we saw at the beginning. The film returns to that original scene to show the woman reveal fangs and claws. The tattoo she bore marked her as a bride of Dracula.

vampire

There isn’t much more lore to offer, though we do get psychic attacks made by a vampire, and we don’t see a plague’s worth of vampires. The exterior establishing holocaust shots look really good but the interior sets are limited and we could have done with some more variety and some more character building. The film certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome at 75 minutes but a bit more time going into the players would have been appreciated. That said the film drips with melodrama, and that melodrama works well. I was rather taken with this despite limitations 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK