CINEMA in the early 70s was awash with tales of mankind’s doomed future. From A Clockwork Orange to Soylent Green, bleak, dystopian stories of man’s fate were everywhere. The Final Programme is the perfect example of that pessimistic trend. It’s also one of the oddest, most confusing and downright psychedelic movies ever to grace a mainstream cinema screen.
Based on a Michael Moorcock, novel it’s the story of Jerry Cornelius (played by Frenzy’s Jon Finch) a billionaire physicist and man about town who, as the world disintegrates around him, is forced into a search for mankind’s “final programme” that’s been developed by his, now deceased, Nobel Prize-winning father.
The programme, which reveals the design for a perfect, self-replicating human being, is buried deep in the old man’s crazy mansion and is jealously guarded by Jerry’s drug-addled brother Frank. A group of strange scientists led by the formidable Miss Brunner, who has an unexplained ability to consume her lovers and take on their attributes, join Jerry on this quest and their adventures take them to a disused Nazi bunker in the Arctic where Brunner and Cornelius must get together to ensure mankind survives the impending apocalypse.
If that synopsis sounds mad, trust me – it doesn’t begin to cover the absolute insanity that bleeds on to the screen throughout. The Final Programme is madder than a box of mescaline-marinated monkeys. At times it makes no sense at all but it’s great fun all the same.
Released in 1973, it was written, designed and directed by Robert Fuest. Fuest was, at the time, best known for his brace of Dr Phibes horror movies that placed the great Vincent Price at the centre of a mad, art deco-inspired revenge fantasy. You can see much of that visual flair and wit in this and also the skill and eye for detail that Fuest brought to his work on The Avengers, perhaps the most stylish TV series ever. There are frames within frames and every scene is set up like a lavish and garishly appointed pop-art painting.
Finch swaggers through it all with an impressive determination, coming over like a scientific Jason King in his ruffled shirts and weary one-liners. Jenny Runacre just about steals the show as the tough and sexy Miss Brunner and there are countless cameos for well-oiled old stalwarts like Harry Andrews and Sterling Hayden.
The script bubbles with some mean put-downs as well. “World War III has been happening for years now,” Cornelius sarcastically dead pans at one point. “Everyone’s just too busy watching the commercials to notice.”
Moorcock hated the adaptation with a passion and fans of the books bemoaned the simplification of the Cornelius character and his outlandish adventures.
Personally I couldn’t care less how close the film is to the book. It’s profoundly silly, with perhaps the most ham-fisted ending of any 70s movie, but it remains superbly entertaining. Like an X-rated feature-length episode of The Avengers that’s taken a walk on the pharmaceutical wild side, it's crazy, incoherent and mind melting.
