The Sky Is Falling (1979 film)

The Sky Is Falling, also known as Las Flores Del Vicio (English: The Flowers of Vice), released in the United States as Bloodbath, is a 1979 Spanish surrealist thriller film directed by Silvio Narizzano and written by Gonzalo Suarez. It stars Dennis Hopper, Carroll Baker, and Win Wells as hopeless American expatriates living in a Spanish village where citizens are dying mysterious deaths after the arrival of a religious cult. The film has been characterized as an example of the frenetic roles played by Hopper in the 1970s.[1]

The Sky is Falling
Directed bySilvio Narizzano
Written byGonzalo Suárez
Produced byAndrés Vicente Gómez
Francisco Vives
StarringDennis Hopper
Carroll Baker
Win Wells
Richard Todd
Faith Brook
Edited byNicholas Wentworth
Music byJosé Nieto
Distributed byCineteca S.A.
Release date
  • 22 October 1979 (1979-10-22) (Spain)
Running time
90 minutes
CountrySpain
LanguagesEnglish
Spanish

Plot

A drug-addicted poet named Chicken (Hopper), struggling to separate reality from fantasy, lives in a small Spanish village with other expatriates. These include a washed up alcoholic actress named Treasure (Carroll Baker), a retired British Air Corps captain (Richard Todd) and his alcoholic wife (Faith Brook), and a jaded homosexual man (Win Wells).

Chicken struggles with his addiction while having vivid hallucinations about his religious mother. Treasure is always waiting for a call from Hollywood in order to stage a comeback, and spends her time showing off her album of publicity photos. The expatriates, bored by their life in the village, encounter a group of young hippies who they feel a bond toward, but throughout the film each of the expatriates end up dead in various, disturbing ways. These deaths are juxtaposed with the life of the villagers in bizarre and surreal ways that develops a sense of menace in the film. It is implied that the deaths are caused by the band of hippies evoking a religious cult or the Manson family,[2] and the deaths of the villagers are followed by a communal funeral held on Good Friday.

Cast
  • Dennis Hopper as Chicken
  • Carroll Baker as Treasure
  • Richard Todd as Terence
  • Faith Brook as Heather
  • Win Wells as Allen
  • David Carpenter as Salt
  • Alibe as Susannah
  • Inma de Santis as Buenaventura
  • Curtis Moseley as Young Chicken
  • Ana Pastor as Pucherita

Production

The film was filmed in Mojacar, Almeria,[3] Spain in 1979, a small seaside village of local Spaniards, British and American expatriates, some of whom were featured in this movie. One of the extras, a young boy who was trampled at the end of the movie, looking towards the sky, was an American living in Spain whose parents ran a local saloon (El Saloon) and had befriended the director and many of the cast members.

Both Carroll Baker and Dennis Hopper, who had starred together in Giant (1956), had been out of major Hollywood pictures for some time when they were cast in the film; Baker had been living in Europe and making giallo and horror films in Italian productions.

References
  1. Weldon, Michael (1996). The Psychotronic Video Guide To Film. St. Martin's Griffin. pp. 62–3. ISBN 978-0312131494.
  2. Newman, Kim (2011). Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s. Bloomsbury. p. 191. ISBN 978-1408805039.
  3. Bergan, Ronald (28 July 2011). "Silvio Narizzano obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 1 April 2016.
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