In the book, the all-purpose human being that emerges is a dazzling, charismatic creature like Adam Warlock in Marvel comics; in the film, he's a hairy hunchbacked neanderthal. Totally ludicrous and completely unnecessary re-writing! Also, why didn't they state explicily Ms Brunner's real nature (she's a succubus, a female sexual vampire); does Moorcock have issues in that area?

I first became aware of this movie at a young age when a couple of stills from it were replicated in a sci-fi book I owned. One of those pictures showed an elaborate colourful nightclub set with giant inflatables and girls in large translucent spheres. Needless to say, I had to check this movie out! I was aware of the character Jerry Cornelius without actually having read any of the Michael Moorcock books which featured him; in fact I first became aware of the character when Games Workshop brought out a metal figurine of him for use in role playing games. Anyhow, I am digressing somewhat, so back to the movie. Its story isn't really its strong point to be perfectly honest. It essentially boils down to Cornelius hooking up with a computer expert called Miss Brunner in order to retrieve a micro-film containing details of the Final Programme, which is a revolutionary scientific process conceived of by Cornelius' late father, which will lead to the creation a self-replicating hermaphrodite messiah. But first the micro-film must be taken by force from Cornelius' deranged brother Frank.The director for this one was Robert Fuest, who was responsible for the 'Dr. Phibes' movies. Like those inventive horror films, this one is visually very interesting, with great set designs and lots of colour. It's a mid-70's future, so it is wild and over-the-top in the manner that many of the best sci-fi films from the period were. The night club for instance is a pop art masterpiece with gaudy décor aplenty and a fantastic colour overload all round. It also has nuns playing fruit machines, and seemingly the members of the space rock band Hawkwind lurking in the background. You could almost say that this scene encapsulates the film as a whole, as it has a primary focus on visuals and a healthy dose of humour, with narrative logic a distant third. This basic formula is maintained throughout with cool detached characters played with distant ironic performances populating a highly stylized world in a story with a screenplay which could charitably be described as 'uneven'. So in order to get anything out of this one I would suggest that you really have to be interested in its visual ideas and overall weird ambiance, as opposed to the narrative itself. Like many of its 70's peers it is a slice of pessimistic sci-fi, set in a possible post-apocalyptic Earth where there is a suggestion that there is an impending disaster yet to come. The ideas don't truthfully seem to be treated entirely seriously, with the jokey tone suggesting that you shouldn't pay too much attention to the story-line. The odd, half-baked ending merely cements this notion further.But I definitely got a kick out of this one. The performances are commendably game, with Jon Finch really very good as Cornelius, the chocolate biscuit addicted dandy of the future. Even better was Jenny Runacre in a thoroughly commandingly sexy performance as Miss Brunner, a bi-sexual predator who literally absorbs her lovers (somehow). There are also some solid cameo appearances from the always weird Patrick Magee as an associate of the demented Frank and Sterling Hayden giving a somewhat bizarre turn as an unhinged military expert. This very strange British sci-fi movie can fairly be described as a cult item. Its anarchic devil-may-care presentation, with some interesting characters and pop art future stylings make it one for fans of weird 70's sci-fi in particular and of strange 70's movies in general. Definitely something of an acquired taste though that is for sure but if you have a taste for baroque, left-of-centre movies and don't mind flippant disregard for trivialities such as plot, then you could have a good time with this one!

An ambiguous adventurer becomes involved with an experiment designed to overcome the impending extinction of the human species. One from the "What were they thinking?!" school of film-making: much like John Boorman's contemporaneous ZARDOZ (1974), this is yet another good-looking but uncontrolled attempt at a 'trippy' post-apocalyptic scenario that ends up being embarrassingly campy – and, here, wasting a fine veteran cast (Sterling Hayden, Patrick Magee, George Coulouris, Harry Andrews and Hugh Griffith) into the bargain – none of whom appear in any scenes together. The main role of Jerry Cornelius had been offered to Mick Jagger (who rejected the script as "too weird"!) and Timothy Dalton before Jon Finch stepped in and basically stopped his promising film career dead in its tracks; in hindsight, it is understandable not only that novelist Michael Moorcock hated this adaptation but also that his prolific literary creation never returned in any further cinematic adventure since! For the record, the supporting cast also features Jenny Runacre (as Cornelius' supremely annoying androgynous acolyte), Graham Crowden, Ronald Lacey, Sarah Douglas and Julie Ege...but every earnest effort on anybody's part is stifled by the film's relentless visual and aural assault on the viewers' senses. Interestingly, the former is reminiscent of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) and the latter features Eric Clapton among the session musicians! When Roger Corman picked up the film for U.S. distribution, he not only trimmed it by 11 minutes but also retitled it as LAST DAYS OF MAN ON EARTH to (reportedly) little effect.

I saw Alain Robbe-Grillet's Eden and After in the cinema a few years back, and I left in a kind of ecstatic trance, and ever after wondered if I was going to have an experience like that in the cinema again. The Final Programme hit the same spot, despite a quite ludicrous ending Bogart quote that seemed almost like an act of self-deprecating sabotage. I walked out of the film gasping and crooning.The Final Programme is one beautiful puppy. The story is from a Michael Moorcock novel, it's about a young man, Jerry Cornelius who, following the death of his genius plutocrat father goes off in search of a microfilm, jealously guarded by his insane brother, in a mansion full of high tech traps and also sought by colleagues. Don't take the plot too seriously though, it's something that you aren't meant to subject to too much scrutiny.The film is an utter masterpiece of atmosphere. I have an interest in British pop art, which has been a shamefully under-recognised movement. I was just astonished to discover that this movie had a lot of the elements from it. For example the walls of Miss Brunner's house are decorated with it, including perhaps the most famous piece of the whole movement, Peter Blake's "Babe Rainbow". I had a sort of pilgrimage last year to Pallant House art gallery in Chichester where a lot of this stuff is stored. There was a Colin Self exhibition on at the time to supplement their permanent collection of British pop art (a movement that predated the American equivalent and is easily as good). His work carries this nuclear apocalyptic beauty/malaise, that you also catch in The Final Programme where characters just offhandedly mention that Rome doesn't look so good without the Vatican, or how miscellaneous other erasures have just happened. You even get Sterling Hayden making an appearance reprising his Buck Turgidson role from Dr Strangelove, only he's better here as Major Wrongway Lindbergh, and wearing lovely orange shooting glasses and (perversely) an ankh medallion! Yup the film sure is one hell of an aesthetic treat, and apparently the design is by Fuest himself, a painter in a previous life who had exhibited at the Royal Academy (excellent preparation for a filmmaker). An example of the outstanding production design that I will mention in a moment is Miss Brunner's nightie. Miss Brunner is a wet dream of a character that you can hardly believe, tapped firmly enough into male sexual fantasy she bears comparison with Kathleen Turner's China Blue in Ken Russell's film of the same name. She is a totally sexually confident woman, absolutely gorgeously dressed and coiffured at all times, in control, who leaves the shooting to the guys, as if they were just being silly little boys. I would call her a black widow, but she's like a golden widow spider (whatever that is), she is destructive, like a Kali (Indian mysticism plays a part in the movie too), playfully sadistic and just utterly mesmerising. She appears at one point wearing a pleated white nightie, that has a crocheted openwork top with the word LOVE in the centre, with scrolls and hearts. There's no way they got that off a hanger somewhere, it's got to have been made by a pop artist, quite the most glorious thing I've seen in a hundred years. She mentions at one point that she always gets the best out of people, well she manages to convince a gorgeous associate to tinkle the ivories with baroque music whilst naked, so I can quite see her point! She has these gorgeous red curls, pink lipstick, gold eye shadow, covered in pink ruffles over a starred white tunic. Sorry to obsess, but well, she obsesses me.The movie stars Jon Finch as Jerry Cornelius, he's like a more sprightly Oliver Reed, extremely charismatic, and I've no idea why his career didn't take off after this movie, but it doesn't seem to have. He's just hilarious as well, he walks up to a spike with some blood on it at one point, touches it and says "ah rhesus negative", ludicrous yet he carries it perfectly. He spends half of the movie eating chocolate digestive biscuits, just crazy. The movie also contains half of my favourite character actors ever, including Patrick Magee (Mr Alexander in A Clockwork Orange - the guy whose wife is raped) and Hugh Griffith (sheikh in Ben-Hur). I just can't believe what I was watching. Unusually for sci-fi the technobabble and philosophobabble actually seemed to be pitch perfect! Truly a strange experience for me, saw Dmitri at one point reading the Larousse Encyclopedia of World Mythology, one of the most splendid books in existence, something that hypnotised me as a child. It almost appeared like Fuest had made this film for me personally, even though at the time I hadn't been born.Best of all, this appears to be on DVD!