Sinister Gazes, Smirking Dooms, and Baaaaad Trips: The Sky is Falling (1975)

Chicken (Dennis Hopper) is a drug addled and frustrated poet, a self-professed summer man caught in a state of winter. He’s living the life of an expatriate in a small Spanish coastal village, shooting up when life gets to be too intense, and balancing an uneven relationship with his Black girlfriend Susannah (Alibe Parsons) and his abandoned typewriter. Chicken’s life takes the first of two major turns when Treasure (Carroll Baker) rescues him from drowning in the surf and lets him recuperate at her place. She welcomes him into the company of several other expats living in the area, including a catty queer called Alice (Win Wells), a lothario retiree from the British Air Corps named Terence (Richard Todd), Terence’s drunken and self-destructive wife Heather (Faith Brook). Among these people, he finds his values tested, particularly when he partially cites the famed motto attributed to Hassan-I-Sabbah: “Nothing is real. Anything is possible. Everything is permitted.” This is met with sneering, snide assumption, and ridicule. Chicken, however, has seen the truth within them, which he cannot seem to communicate to his fellow outcasts.

The second big change in Chicken’s life comes in the form of a group of sexy, young, vibrant, mysterious folks arriving on a yacht. The elderly expats are pretty well taken with this youthful motley, seeing in them a way to possibly rekindle their own guttering candleflames. Terrence takes to girly Yo-Yo (Swan Swan), much to the chagrin of his wife. Chicken ditches his own girl to fall into the arms of Virginia (Ivonne Sentis), Treasure cottons onto the studly, mute Salt (Domingo Coedesido Ascanio), while Alice fashions onto the flirtatious tease Turd (Rory MacDonald).

The arrival of this new blood has done more than energize mid-life crises and old gonads, however. It triggers a series of brutal murders. Kicking off with a young, blond local boy drowning in a well during a Good Friday celebration. The expats begin to suffer and die, one of them being strung up in the meat house alongside other split open carcasses, another shot to pieces on a remote hillside … An abstinent pregnant woman calling herself Currination (Inma de Santis) might have answers, but the expats don’t even know what questions to ask of her. They are too busy burying their heads in different sorts of sand pits: the arms of mysterious lovers, toxic bottles, poisonous needles, or dreams of the past. Will they realize what’s going on, or will they all succumb to their own vices and

Silvio Narizzano helms a surreal picture that offers a major kiss off to the values of previous generations with the unsettling The Sky is Falling (1975).

The film is a kind of meditative body count picture, a proto slasher film that gives us a body of potential victims and then picks them off one by one in clever, personally motivated ways. Of course, the body of victims is all on the older side, and the methods of annihilation are often plays on the individual’s flaws. However, there is a kind of nod to Tobe Hooper’s seminal Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) in that a bunch of people who have ideas about how the world works leave their comfort zones, find themselves bickering and unable to understand the area they’ve come to for sun, escape, and retreat and are destroyed by a malicious force brooding there that, while not overtly supernatural, nevertheless suggests an oppressive cosmic fate. Unlike Hooper’s picture, the instruments of destruction are not a family removed from civilization’s niceties and mores but a society that these expats willfully refuse to embrace, understand, or even empathize with. This time around, the expats are the family removed from civilization’s expectations and they are punished.

There are also elements of folk horror flicks such as The Wicker Man (1974) here. The picture opens with an old woman and a young boy walking their pig along. They encounter another group, which includes a pretty blonde girl dressed in pale dress astride a donkey that’s covered with flowers like some kind of royal vessel … or ceremonial sacrifice. Money is traded, so too a pig, and a promise is made. We don’t hear the particulars, but the essence translates: a ritual has just been agreed upon, the elements put into place. Each of those members will be seen again, and if they offer unsettling smiles to the expats, it’s a promise of that member’s imminent doom. The little girl and her burro eventually come back in a rather disturbing way, as well, the animal dead and the child gleefully beating its carcass.

Oh, and it’s probably important to mention how this film includes some animal butchery. It does not seem staged for the film itself, more like the cameras rolled during either everyday activities or a holiday’s preparations, but there are at least two on-screen animal deaths in the flick as well as some usage of carcasses—a pair of pig heads hanging from a stick and twirled around during a dance on Good Friday is surprisingly disturbing, particularly in how gleeful the local woman doing the whirling and stick wielding is. Trigger warning for those sensitized to such things.

Likewise, there are a couple of child deaths. Those are staged, of course, but nevertheless disturbing. One of them seems to be suggestive of a running of the bulls tragedy, though the bulls in question are human feet, stomping the child, smashing his fragile body into the ground and then leaving his twisted form gazing up at the big, blue, unresponsive heavens.

When the picture was released here in the states, it got the title Bloodbath, which might have emphasized the exploitation values of the thing but isn’t terribly representative of the picture itself. This is not a bloodbath of a movie, it’s an art house fable with occasional murder, it’s an acid trip oddity that evokes Yeats’ “The Second Coming” with rituals of innocence drowned, with blood dimmed tides, and heady symbolic imagery. It’s a picture that has things on its mind and an inability to stay focused, so it muddles the waters and messages with a slew of tangents and odd choices. It’s a picture that wants to excoriate the values of the previous generation but which also doesn’t trust the next generation. It’s a psychologically rich story of minds shattered, realities questioned, and moral constructs eradicated. It’s a fascinating picture that offers plenty of conversation starters and imagery which we can interpret as real or imagined, metaphoric or literal and remains vague when it comes to answers. There is a precociousness to the thing, a preciousness, and a childish desire to shock for its own sake.

Needless to say, there are squirm worthy moments aplenty. After a brief prologue in which a smirking woman pays a party to take her pig and perform some unknown but ritualistic service, the film pretty well opens with a brief bit of Hopper’s character Chicken skidding into the surf and collapsing before we backtrack to his encounter with Susannah. She’s brought home eggs to find him high on heroin, and he destroyed her offering, smears some on her face, verbally abuses her, and then forces her into singing a tearful rendition of “Shortenin’ Bread.” A lot to unpack there. It tells us quite a bit about these characters and none of it is particularly sympathetic or charming. In fact, this encapsulates the whole movie: there’s not a single sympathetic character to be found here. As for charming, I didn’t find it but YMMV.

The villagers are all sinister as hell, the expats are all the faces of old generation values needing to be eradicated, and the young intrusion might be likened to cultists (ala Charlie Manson’s gang), but they are essentially empty vessels, drawing their identities from what their prey (and the audience) pours into them.

The leads are complex characters, layered. They also manage to be symbolic representations as well as straight up roles. It’s all very artistically done, but the stock of this particular dish is an unpleasant one.

Dennis Hopper was at one of his career’s many nadirs, so he plays the desperate and the lost quite effectively. His wildness and unpredictability is in keeping with the picture’s themes so tightly, we wonder if the part was written for him.

Likewise, it’s fascinating to see Carroll Baker playing a dark reflection of her own career. She’d been a big deal in Hollywood for a time but left for Europe where she appeared in giallo films, horror pictures, and other projects. Not to suggest she is anywhere as desperate or delusional as her character, but Hollywood did not seem to be wooing her home with the material that would effectively bring her back, and it would not for a few more years. She brings a self-reflective irony to the character and a yearning that’s not dissimilar to Ellen Burstyn’s memorable performance in the equally gutting Requiem for a Dream (2000).

The Sky is Falling is a film that’s utterly insane and yet highly watchable, if only to see where the incredibly bizarre plotting, acting choices, and visuals will take us next. This is not a story perse, a plot with a discernable beginning, middle, and end, but a cyclical story that winds back upon itself and ends where it began. It’s a widening gyre where nothing is real, anything is possible, and everything is permitted.

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The Sky is Falling is a part of the Villages of the Damned: Three Horrors From Spain Blu-ray set from Vinegar Syndrome. It is not available in either standalone DVD or VOD editions.

Next, we will take a look at A Blade in the Dark, a gruesome giallo from Lamberto Bava. It is available in DVD and VOD, and 4K UHD/Blu-ray combo editions.

Writing for “Sinister Gazes, Smirking Dooms, and Baaaaad Trips: The Sky is Falling (1975)” is copyright © 2023 by Daniel R. Robichaud.

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