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 Late August at the Hotel Ozone More at IMDbPro »Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon (original title)

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14 out of 17 people found the following review useful:
Why couldn't you've been born a blonde?, 12 August 2004
Author: Gangsteroctopus (gangsteroctopus@socal.rr.com) from SoCal

I saw this last night at the American Cinematheque as part of their tribute to screenwriter Pavel Juracek, and I have to say WOW. I was thoroughly impressed, completely engrossed from the first frame. The Cinematheque's schedule described this as "MAD MAX directed by Andrei Tarkovsky", which isn't far from the mark.

The actress who played the Old Lady, the leader of the amazons, has one of the most beautifully expressive faces I have ever seen onscreen, and this quality was only emphasized by the razor sharp black-&-white cinematography that brought out every tiny detail of emotional nuance. I found myself imagining that the Old Lady had been the teacher at an all-girl elementary school, and that after the Apocalypse she had merely extended her role of den mother into chief of the amazons' little tribe.

The actresses who play her young charges, nearly all apparently amateurs (only a few have any other film credits), are all attractive to a greater or lesser degree, but not in a slick, Hollywood way. They're like healthy, athletic peasant girls and farmer's daughters. Many appear to be expert equestrians - how to describe the thrill of seeing one of them mount a galloping horse sans saddle or stirrups? Of particular note is the young woman who played Barboura, the Old Lady's heir apparent, a statuesque red(?)head, a Balkan Sophia Loren. What a shame that she and nearly all of the other amazons made only this film and no others. They're all completely believable in their roles as young women transformed by the rigors and loneliness of their post-apocalyptic environment into hardened, even cruel near-barbarians (all without any male influence, mind you).

A word of caution for animal lovers: there all several scenes in which real animals - a snake, a cow - are actually killed onscreen, and very graphically. By today's standards this may seem callous, even evil, but in the context of the film I can understand how the filmmakers might have felt justified in doing so as these killings make the point of who these women are and what they've become (unlike, say, some of the egregious mondo thrills of onscreen animal slaughter in nearly every Italian cannibal film ever made). As for the dog mentioned by a previous reviewer, I'm uncertain whether or not it was killed. It may have been merely snared by one leg and pulled down to simulate its being shot, and it does appear to still be breathing after one of the amazons knocks its skull in just below the frameline; but it's hard for me to imagine an animal in such obvious distress being well-trained enough to suddenly go quiet after a 'pretend' blow to the head with a rifle butt. Besides, it's obviously a malnourished mutt and earlier in the film one of the actresses does connect with its head when she hurls a small log at it. Well, you can be the judge if you ever have a chance to see the film - which, if it does come up, I highly recommend you take.

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8 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
A chilling future, 3 April 1999
9/10
Author: rhopkins from Tallahassee, Florida

It is 25 or so years after a nuclear war, and a few hardy young women, and an older leader, are wandering (in Czechoslovakia?) in search of canned food from before the war that can be safely eaten. No men apparently survive, being less resistant to radiation. They come across a mountain resort hotel, the Hotel Ozone, where an old man lives alone with a wind-up record player and old books and magazines. The young women, raised as barbarians, act the part. The person who introduced me to this chilling movie pointed out that science fiction movies were supposed to have monsters, and suggested looking for the monsters in this one. The B&W cinematography is great, especially in scenes of the women practicing their horseback riding skills and exploring a ruined town. You'll never be able to hear the tune "Roll Out the Barrel" the same way again.

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11 out of 15 people found the following review useful:
Excellent futuristic tale, 22 May 2004
Author: littlesiddie from Cambridge, MA

There isn't much of a story line in this film. But the characters and atmosphere are very effective.

There is one somewhat disturbing, but brief, sequence where a nice looking German shepherd dog is killed. I think they just simulated it's death by catching one of it's legs in a humane trap, but the dog's piteous yelps are still very heart rending.

The rest of the movie is very good, especially towards the end when the group of women are staying at the nearly abandoned hotel.

In a way, this movie was very well structured, even though there isn't much of story. It starts out slow and sets a scene, and then the plot thickens fairly smoothly and progressively towards the end. And it has a really tremendous ending, but I don't want to reveal it.

And, of course, the best thing about this movie are the feral young Amazonian women.

I'd love to have a copy of this film. It's a pity that it's out of print.

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4 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Girls Gone Wild after the End of the World, 22 February 2010
9/10
Author: Raegan Butcher from Rain City, Pacific Northwest

For many years a very hard to find film from Czechoslovakia about a band of young women led by an older female military officer roaming the post-apocalyptic landscape. A lonely old man living in a blown-out hotel is the only sign of life they come across in their wanderings. The young women have never seen a man but the old woman makes a painful connection with him over their shared sense of loss for the world that has been destroyed, a world the young women have never known.

This was an excellent film. It was well-made, thoughtful and almost poetic in its sense of loss.It moves slowly but I was never bored. There were several scenes of animal cruelty that were very disturbing that I could have done without but I think they illustrated the point as intended. The message of the film--that people will revert to barbarism within a generation after society collapses--is depressing and the film leaves one without much hope for the human race.

This would make an excellent double-feature with Luc Besson's Le Dernier Combat.

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7 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
The Most Evocative title in the SF Genre, 22 August 2004
8/10
Author: Joe Stemme (gortx) from United States

I remember seeing a small handbill in a college basement around 1980. One of the films to be screened was THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE. The title intrigued, but, being the typical "too busy College Student" I did not attend the showing. So, for about a quarter century the title just lingered in my memory. Unreachable. I've NEVER heard of it screening anywhere, playing on TV or available on video or DVD (even in bootleg form). The title itself was so tantalizing, promising perhaps something apocalyptic (END OF "THE WORLD" not "AUGUST" perhaps?) or mysterious (a Hotel in the Ozone Layer?). And, of course, its sheer scarcity could only enhance the mystery, the suspense. Then, there it was in the American Cinemateque schedule. Oh, NO, I wasn't going to miss it this time! I had been up for work since 4 AM (!) and had worked a full 12 hour day. But, I was NOT to be denied! While the film does not quite live up to its evocative title (there was no reasonable way it could), it's still a find Eastern European contribution to the Post-Nuke, End-Of-The-World and Lord of the Flies sub-genre(s).

After an oblique reference to the Nuclear calamity that man inflicted upon itself some 15 years earlier, the film proper begins slowly as we come to see a band of young, presumably fertile women, led by a wise old sage. I emphasize the word slowly, because the pace is off-putting at first. Events do happen and we get a picture of the women's pathetic and lonely existence. I particularly admired the fact that they are not scrubbed clean, shaved, manicured and primped and prettified as they doubtless would have been in an American production - Remember all those "lost women" films where the tribal women look like beauty contestants (indeed a couple of the actresses are very attractive, just unkempt)?! But, the glacial pacing is almost enough to drive most viewer's patience beyond the brink. Once the group stumbles upon an old man and his "Hotel Ozone", the film comes into its own. Where the viewer is naturally inclined to sympathize with the women (if they had been men would we be so accepting?) despite some cruel, savage and disturbing activities (particularly towards animals), slowly we come to see a fuller and less positive view towards them. This reversal is doubtless intentional and packs a strong visceral punch. The final images of this band of lost ladies wandering a barren landscape is both heart-breaking and depressingly believable.

It's to the film's credit that we are not given a false or tidy ending: Befitting a title as gloriously ambiguous as THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE.

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3 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Gritty and real depiction of the future, 18 September 2008
9/10
Author: Kevin Schwoer from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Depicting a dark and nomadic future, The End of August at the Hotel Ozone is a film that was ahead of its time. Much of Hollywood and television have generated many post apocalyptic material in the last twenty years. Whether it has to do with nuclear war becoming more and more realistic or Nostradamus' predictions that the world will end in 2012, or somewhere in between, we will never know. But the entertainment business has cashed in on the very real and terrifying idea, or perhaps actuality.

The film directed by Jan Schmidt and made in 1966, is set in an unknown year. To the characters it doesn't matter what year it is and realistically speaking it wouldn't matter anyway. The world has ended through nuclear holocaust and a strong opening conveys this narrative with countdowns spoken in every language, counting down the end of the world, which is fantastic.

Following eight young women born after the end, the story involves an older woman who is leading them to find civilization, if any. Everyone else has died including all the males leaving the women to fend for themselves. Much of the film depicts their lives out in the country and it makes for needless and boring stuff, though it has a point. At the end of the world these women have nothing and the director captures a very authentic realism. These eight young women are held at bay by the will of the older woman who is the last inkling of the old, civilized world. Yet the realism goes beyond the boring stuff. The actresses in this film are seen catching runaway horses and mounting them bareback while running and diving doing all their own stunts. In this sense the film sometimes seems as if it is a documentary instead.

Halfway through the film they meet up with an old man, a partner for the old woman. The young women don't know what he is, never having seen a man before. The relationship between the two older people is truly heartbreaking. The young women look like savages in front of them and there is a scene where everyone is eating which depicts just that. The old woman on one end and the old man on the other while all the young women in between. In scenes like this the director's voice can be heard loud and clear. This film isn't just about the end of the world; it is a commentary on the human condition which is timeless. The younger generation comes up and destroys what the older generation worked for. Without guidance the children become savages, and generations of the vicious circle will eventually lead us back to the Stone Age, nomadic and primitive. The film ends with the two older people dead and the "children" alone, doing and taking what they please. Jan Schmidt's outlook on life is grim though maybe not entirely untrue.

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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
A bleak prophecy of The Road.., 6 November 2010
6/10
Author: chaos-rampant from Greece

Jan Schmidt's film is a bleak prophecy of later works, Cormac Mccarthy's The Road and Michael Haneke's Time of the Wolf included. It's a journey through a bleak barren landscape where characters are lost in it rather than found, set after an unspecified apocalypse that leaves the world an empty desolate place, not the end of the world like in an Emmerich film where destruction is an exciting spectacle to witness as but rather "an" end to the world, a hazy blur of abandonment filled with residues of mystery and nameless violence.

The film is a blank canvas. Distraught characters are violent and aimless in a desolate landscape of some other order. Where people like Herzog or Malick or Tarkovksy found great things of spiritual importance to say on this other order, Schmidt's film is empty and distanced. When the film needs to be stark, animals are murdered for the camera, a dog is shot or a cow is slaughtered. The basic means of expression in The Road are poetic, here they are allegoric. As the characters of McCarthy's novel stagger starved and hopeless through the scorched macadam we can taste bitter ash in our mouths. Here they simply walk through shrubs. We don't fear for their souls, so to speak.

And then it gets interesting because the rugged band of amazons stumbles upon the ruins of an old hotel in the middle of the forest and there's an old man living there alone who sees in the young girls (all born after the apocalypse so they don't even have a word for "man" or "grammophone") a new future, new mothers for a new civilization of men. The first among the women, the leader, an old woman who was young before the apocalypse and can remember a time when "the cans didn't rust and the land didn't despise us", she doesn't allow herself to be dragged along on new hope, she is resigned to the end of times. The end is bleak and poignant, a hopeful future is not suggested, and the tiny pocket that preserves the civilization of the old world (where gramophones play music, where cows still make milk) is left behind to rot in the forest. What The End of August at the Hotel Ozone says about the communist regime of the time is at once vague enough to fool censors but clear in emotional duress.

This was a very interesting precursor to dystopian films that deal with the end of the world in sombre quiet terms. If it's not terribly successful it's because it's faintly groping in the dark where no one else had gone before, because it uses vague characters to sketch a very clear picture in allegory.

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3 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
some girls are bigger than others, 28 February 2008
8/10
Author: JSBOND008 from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

this apocalyptic themed movie should be appreciated. my favorite element of the film is how it shows how efficient humans become at something they have to do,especially if it is the first and foremost human feeling, the will to survive. Seven women (one of them my absolute dream girl) are all that's left on a deserted world. the movie also includes severe animal cruelty (dog, cow, fish, man) but hey anything for the sake of cinema and don't forget, it was filmed in 1966. Another excellent element to the film was the contrast in emotion from the older people depicted in the movie, Mrs. Hurtzburger and the old man vs. the women who were too young when the plague occurred so never gained a sense of culture (no countries, no TV, no music etc) and are very similar to animals (as they are called before killing the only remaining man on the planet for his only worthwhile material possession. Professor Wojcik: I write a review on every movie you show and more here:

http://www.flixster.com/user/jsbond008

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The New Man/Woman?, 22 June 2010
Author: effigiebronze from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

This movie is a stunner, to be sure, and easily decades ahead of its time; the atmosphere of degradation and decay, and just plain desolation, is far beyond anything accomplished in any other film, and I include the immortal MAD MAX 2.

However, I have to, HAVE TO, ask the question of whether this film works, as do most Central/Eastern European films, on more than one level, and whether there is inner commentary contained in the film.

Watching it, I was struck by the subtext of how the old world has ended, and a new world begun, with new and young people with no knowledge of what went before; this is a basic tenet of radical Communism. The old people, clutching to the remnants of their soft and settled existence, dreaming of a life gone and never to exist again... as the Old One dies, so does the last vestige of any form of culture, or art, of even civilized behavior, and all that is left is a gramophone record of ROLL OUT THE BARREL being carried on horseback by heavily armed and murderous beasts; who themselves lack the capacity to reproduce.

I watched this film as a veiled indictment of the Eastern Bloc Communist belief that required history to be eradicated, for a new world to emerge after that holocaust, only to find the act of destruction (with an intent to rebuild) resulted in nothing less than the death of civilization and the creation of savages with no higher conscience.

I admit to an influence, though, in that I was in the Balkans during the 'wars' of the 1990s; and one of the most striking and heartbreaking things was many people's belief that Socialism had created a New Man, with no history; and how unfathomably shocked they were to have these fine creations of humanity revealed as violent animals bent on nothing more than mindless destruction.

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1 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
strange, slow, a bit pathetic, 5 May 2009
9/10
Author: davidadamec from Australia

I like the slow pace of the movie. Nothing happens for ages... And there's a lot of theatrical pathos. Nonetheless, what I like very much, is a kind of budget-wise method applied in the movie. Most of it happens in the open meadows - I suppose in some old abandoned army area somewhere in Czechoslovakia. Nothing much is shown, we can just guess.

I have to admit, the film is really interesting. It is one of those few sci-fi films which have been made within famous Czechoslovakian film industry. There are few more rare and interesting titles which I recommend to see. Try "Upír z Ferratu" = Vampire from Ferrat (funny quotation of the classical film horror icon "Nosferatu") - film from 80' from a Czech director Juraj Herz. Kind of weird biotech sport car movie about a racing car which sucks the driver's blood... Reminds David Cronenberg.

to hall 900: I just wanna mention, the old woman Martha, you like so much, is not called Ondřej Jariabek - he is the old man, but she is Jitka Hořejší.

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