Satire comes no darker, meaner or more malignantly funny than this strange, bold, brutally on-target end-of-the-world lampoon based on Michael Moorcock's corrosively sardonic cult novels about hipster anti-hero supreme Jerry Cornelius. Jon Finch (the sullen, untrustworthy lead cat in Roman Polanski's magnificent "Macbeth") is stone cold aces as Cornelius, a brilliant, carefree, easygoing and dry-humored bon vivant rich dude who gets involved with ruthless corporate tigress Jenny Runacre. Runacre wants to mate with irresistible stud muffin Cornelius in order to produce a New Messiah who will save the planet, which has really gone to seed, from impending mass destruction. Assisting Jerry on his perilous mission are a striking trio of horridly grotesque caricatures of specific establishment types, each one expertly hammed to colorful perfection by a well-chosen character actor: Sterling Hayden doing a deft reprise of his batty army general from "Dr. Strangelove" as a salty warmonger general, Patrick Magee as a melancholy professor, and George Coulouris as a cold-hearted, unscrupulous scientist are every bit as deliciously wicked and enjoyably broad as they should be.
Adeptly written, directed and designed in an appropriately baroque and garish style by Robert Fuest, "The Final Programme" savagely sends up pride, greed, apathy (all the characters treat the world's unavoidable end like it was a minor, harmless inconvenience!), religious hypocrisy and omnipotence, self-indulgence taken to an appalling hedonistic extreme (y'know, partying your life away with an endless stream of sex, drugs and booze), and, most delightfully, even pretentious, self-important, overly solemn science fiction pictures (the uproarious conclusion, with the New Messiah turning out to be a wisecracking, blue-fingernailed apeman who impersonates Humphrey Bogart, mercilessly mocks the beginning of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey"). The net result of all this acrimonious bile is a devilishly amusing and frequently black-as-coal pip. Appearing in nice bits are Derrick O'Connor as Jerry's estranged, out of it dope fiend brother, Ronald Lacey as an icy assassin, Julie Ege as an ill-fated tart, and Sarah Douglas (Ursa in the first two "Superman" movies) as one of Jerry's numerous squeezes. Acidic, incisive and unsparingly mordant, "The Final Programme" overall cuts it as a bracing, ferociously funny, uncompromisingly bleak, and bloody fine example of that rare odd bird: a genuinely successful sci-fi black comedy.
Adeptly written, directed and designed in an appropriately baroque and garish style by Robert Fuest, "The Final Programme" savagely sends up pride, greed, apathy (all the characters treat the world's unavoidable end like it was a minor, harmless inconvenience!), religious hypocrisy and omnipotence, self-indulgence taken to an appalling hedonistic extreme (y'know, partying your life away with an endless stream of sex, drugs and booze), and, most delightfully, even pretentious, self-important, overly solemn science fiction pictures (the uproarious conclusion, with the New Messiah turning out to be a wisecracking, blue-fingernailed apeman who impersonates Humphrey Bogart, mercilessly mocks the beginning of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey"). The net result of all this acrimonious bile is a devilishly amusing and frequently black-as-coal pip. Appearing in nice bits are Derrick O'Connor as Jerry's estranged, out of it dope fiend brother, Ronald Lacey as an icy assassin, Julie Ege as an ill-fated tart, and Sarah Douglas (Ursa in the first two "Superman" movies) as one of Jerry's numerous squeezes. Acidic, incisive and unsparingly mordant, "The Final Programme" overall cuts it as a bracing, ferociously funny, uncompromisingly bleak, and bloody fine example of that rare odd bird: a genuinely successful sci-fi black comedy.