By Geno McGahee
I am a huge fan of NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR, but just recently found out that it consisted of several full length movies chopped up into little tales to fit into it. One of the movies that were used to make up that anthology was “THE NIGHTMARE NEVER ENDS,” or “CATACLYSM.”
Olivier (Robert Bristol) is a wealthy and evil man. Well, actually, he’s not a man at all. He is the devil and he has been causing misery throughout history. At one point, he was a ruthless Nazi and that is exactly how an old Jewish man, Abraham Weiss (Marc Lawrence) remembers him…he just can’t explain how he hasn’t aged in so many years.
Lt. Sterne (Cameron Mitchell) is friends with Weiss and agrees to help him research Olivier, but things get nasty quick and Weiss is killed. Sterne is now intent on bringing Olivier to justice.
James Hanson (Richard Moll) is an atheist that has written a book about it and is rather patronizing to his Catholic wife, Claire (Faith Clift). Now, before I go any further, I must say that Faith Clift is one of the worst actresses that I have seen in a film that is this good. The casting was outstanding in this but Clift is just terrible.
This movie is fantastic. Bristol’s portrayal of Olivier was chilling and the battle between him and the equally great Mitchell was fantastic to watch. The only bad point is that the movie keeps shifting back to Clift and she just can’t deliver the lines convincingly. Had they gotten a good actress, this movie would have been so much better.
One thing that I noticed about this movie was that there was no Claymation. In NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR, they added a lot of shitty Claymation that took away from the impact of the film. Actually, the way that it was cut up didn’t do it justice. I always liked the tale in the anthology, but here it is just so great. I’m glad that I saw this second. I don’t think that I could sit through the cut up version and tolerate it had it been the other way around.
Despite the horrid performance of Clift, this movie is an absolute winner. Olivier has a genuine presence on film and the flashbacks to his Nazi days mixed with the news clippings of past events are just so neat. I can’t recommend this movie enough. It is fantastic.
Rating: 8.5/10
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