Film Review: End of Days (1999)

In End of Days, the Devil turns up every 1000 years to impregnate a specific woman. If he succeeds, he can take over the world, and it’s the End. The year is 1999 and the woman is Christine, who’s been marked from birth for this fate. Her only hope? Suicidal former cop Jericho. This means the fate of the world depends on his ability to cock block the Devil. It doesn't look like an easy task, but he’s played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, so the Devil doesn’t stand a chance… or does he? Warning: SPOILERS.

Fun fact: this came out in the same year as Stigmata (reviewed here), which, coincidentally, also featured Gabriel Byrne. Clearly, 1999 had some issues.

I know that Hollywood loves to twist or outright ignore what the Book of Revelation actually says, but End of Days goes even further and uses a single verse (Revelation 20:7 – “When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison”) to justify a plot that has absolutely nothing to do with it. Since the movie came up with its own prophecy, there was no need to quote from Revelation. Not that any of it makes any sense. Let’s see, the infamous 666 is really 999, and it means that once every 1000 years the Dark Angel will leave Hell to come to our world, possess a predetermined human man, and impregnate a predetermined human woman, who were both selected thanks to a specific star alignment at the time of their respective births. He has 1 hour to do it, between 11 pm and 12 am of the last day before the new millennium begins. This was what kickstarted the creation of the Gregorian calendar. Where to begin… A text that was translated from the Greek used current Western numbers? Even if you accept that the years are right, how the hell were some medieval Europeans able to predict the exact hour centuries ago in another continent? Jericho jokingly asks if it’s Eastern Time, but that’s actually a legitimate question. And if it’s every 1000 years, wouldn’t that mean the Devil already turned up somewhere in the year 999? How was he defeated then? Or was he waiting for the humans to figure that out before starting his devious world domination plan? Also, why would the pregnancy signal the End? This is obviously a reference to the Antichrist, but even in its Hollywood version, the danger is in the future, after he becomes a powerful adult. Here it seems the moment the Devil has sex with Christine everything is over. This is just too dumb. What’s funny is that the Douay-Rheims translation (at least the one I got) refers to the 666 Beast as a woman, so if the movie really wanted to link its prophecy to the Bible, it could’ve tried using that detail instead of the verse about the Dragon being released from its prison 1000 years after the Four Horsemen, the seven seals, and the locusts did their thing. Oddly, neither the Pope nor any of the Catholics in this movie seem to care that the Eye of God prophecy means the Bible is wrong…

Well, that’s it for the Biblical accuracy, but what about the rest? For starters, there’s a surprising number of explosions. Really, the explosions budget for this movie must’ve been huge. Too bad they didn’t think of setting a little aside for the CGI, because when the Devil appeared in its true form near the end he looked shockingly bad. Yes, I know it was 1999, but still. When it’s not exploding things or giving the audience embarrassing special effects, End of Days features a few good weird scenes and some nice gory moments. For instance, when Christine is born, Nurse Mabel takes her to the hospital morgue where Dr Abel awaits. He marks the Devil’s future baby mama by killing a rattlesnake, and sticking his finger in it to take a little blood to give to Christine. The doctor, by the way, is played by Udo Kier, who I’m sure I’ve seen in other things, but always remember as Åge Krüger from The Kingdom, who coincidentally was also trying to get a woman pregnant (so he could be reborn through her child). Abel fares even worse than Krüger. First, the Devil turns up at his place and immediately has a threesome with his wife and daughter. Then, after Mabel fails to deliver Christine right then and there, even though it’s only because she’s worried Jericho and his friend Bobby will follow her to their temple, the Devil punches a hole through his head. It wasn’t even his fault! That isn’t the only time the Devil does that – during a chase in an underground train, he punches through the conductor’s chest, ripping out his heart in the process. I wish there’d been more punching and less shooting. Father Thomas, the prophecy expert whom the Vatican sends to find the girl and protect her, cut his tongue off, though we don’t get to see that since it happened before the movie started, and keeps it in a jar. He also waited until 6 months before the deadline to actually do something about the impending apocalyptic nookie. Really, what had he been doing during the previous 20 years? And if he’s willing to start shooting at the Devil’s vessel in broad daylight, why didn’t he and his Church buddies try something a little sneakier like, say, kidnap Christine? Idiots. While it was fun seeing the Devil being a total jerk and mess with him before his death, the whole tying him to the ceiling just looked confusing. At first, I thought he had done a Blood Eagle, but no. Was it all for the jump scare when he turned out to still be alive (for 5 seconds before the satanist paedophile cop shot him)? Unlike Father Thomas, the guard to the satanists’ temple still has his tongue, but his eyes were sewn shut. How does he know who to let in? By smelling the negative emotions in their hearts. Which is why he lets Jericho inside when the Devil is about to fulfill the prophecy. Clearly the satanists didn’t think this one through. There’s also a weird hobo who’s sadly wasted. Christine’s visions were wasted, too. She hallucinates the aforementioned hobo, sees tormented souls on an apple, and dreams about the Devil’s threesome with Abel’s wife and daughter, who get fused together to form Christine herself. By the way, she tells Jericho that she’s been dreaming of having sex with the Devil’s vessel all her life. Were all the other dreams as unappealing as that one? Because that was definitely not sexy.

We only get glimpses of the Church’s monitoring of the situation, which seems to be split between the Vatican and the basement of St John’s Church. That’s where Jericho sees a woman with stigmata wounds speaking in an unknown language, which, for some reason, the movie never identifies as Aramaic. This is unforgivable! The use of Aramaic is mandatory in movies featuring weird biblical shit. This nice, but ineffectual group – really, they pretty much do nothing – is led by Father Kovak, and is the complete opposite of the Vatican Knights, who have been preparing for the Dark Angel’s arrival for ages and whose preferred method of dealing with the situation is to simply kill Christine before the Devil gets to her. Was this what they did the last time? Is that why nothing happened in 999? Well, all that preparedness doesn’t help them defeat Jericho, Bobby, and Christina, much less the Devil himself, who turns up at St John’s Church looking for his woman. It starts promisingly enough, with him stabbing one of the priests with a crucifix on the head, but instead of some creative carnage, he just throws people around and snaps the neck of the Knights’ leader. Worse, when Jericho sees them again, Kovak and his team are still alive and in one piece, hanging out in the church’s basement. How did they survive the Devil’s rampage? Did he leave without checking the rest of the building? This isn’t the worst of his oversights, though. At one point, after some of his minions beat up Jericho, he’s left crucified, hanging on a wall. And how is he crucified? By tying his wrists and ankles to the cross! What kind of self respecting Dark Angel doesn’t use nails? Apart from these examples of shocking negligence, he’s everything you’d expect from the Devil – cruel, deceitful, and seductive – and some things you probably never thought of – he has flammable pee! Yes, really. Unfortunately, the rest of the characters feel more like superficial descriptions. Jericho is a walking cliché, and Schwarzenegger’s limited acting abilities don’t help. Christine should be interesting, but the movie is tell rather than show when it comes to her struggle. She does get to shoot a Devil’s minion, though. Bobby is what you’d expect from this type of character. Even his betrayals were predictable, but he did his job as the Lead Character’s Trusted Sidekick. On the other hand, Marge should’ve had way more screentime for her betrayal to mean something, or at least be genuinely shocking instead of random. Someone else who needed more screentime was Mabel. I’m guessing she was possessed by a demon considering how strong she was, but the movie never bothers explaining anything about her. At least Dr Abel had a good death, and Father Thomas had the tongue thing. Jericho’s wife and daughter are nothing but a generic tragic backstory, and everyone else is just there.

Since End of Days decided to sideline the Church, how is the war against the Devil and his minions fought? With guns and explosions, lots of explosions. There’s also a helicopter chase in the beginning, when Jericho is trying to catch Father Thomas, and that underground chase I mentioned in a previous paragraph. These action sequences don’t quite gel with the quieter, creepier ones. I wonder if the movie would have been the same if the lead actor had been someone else. It’s like it couldn’t resist turning into a Schwarzenegger blockbuster. The final confrontation is a mixed bag. There’s that atrocious CGI Devil, which kind of works when you only see a bit of the wing from behind, but beyond that it’s awful. Jericho regaining his faith looks cheesy, and the jump on the sword is unintentionally funny. In reality, that’s probably the only way it would work, as merely letting yourself fall on the blade would be way too slow and possibly not even deadly. However, it still looks hilarious. How did he even hit the right spot? Still, the crumbling church and the fiery candles are impressive. And Jericho being possessed, killing himself to stop the Devil from winning, and being reunited with his wife and daughter in the afterlife is better than pairing him up with Christine.

VERDICT

There’s a weird horror movie underneath all the action-y stuff, but whenever it breaks through, it gets pushed back down by all the shooting and explosions. It would be interesting to see what the story could’ve been like without all that. Anyway, End of Days may not be brilliant or clever, but it’s entertaining.

By Danforth