End of Days (1999)

It's our End of Days Sale! Everything Must Go!

This one is about that big Y2K disaster that never happened, and how we all bought lots of bottled water, guns, and inflatable women, and it was all for naught! And it turns out it was the devil’s fault, not Jimmy Carter’s, as previously announced.

End of Days (1999)
Directed by Peter Hyams
Written by Andrew W. Marlowe

It’s December 28th, 1999 and Jesus Christ...I mean Jericho Cane (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is an atheistic, suicidal former cop. His disdain for life is evident when he picks up old pizza off the floor, mixes it with coffee and raw eggs, and blends it into a nutritious shake (one in the morning, one for lunch, and a sensible dinner out of the McDonald’s dumpster at night). These days Arnold works as a bodyguard, protecting scummy investment bankers. As bad as that sounds, it gets even worse, as his latest client, “The Man” (Gabriel Byrne), is Satan.

It seems that Lucifer hath risen from hell on a matter of cosmic importance—he’s got a hot date. See, it was predicted that at the end of a thousand years (starting a thousand years ago, conveniently enough) a woman would exist who could bear the devil’s child—and Christine (Robin Tunney) is That Girl! If her EPT strip turns blue, it will usher in the End of Days, which is not only the prophesied End of the World, but also a switch in the cosmic power structure, with the Devil becoming the Supreme Being and everybody on Earth going to hell. Left unexplained is whether everybody in hell comes to Earth. And if so, does that mean that horned demons and scorched, flayed, brimstone-scented souls in torment would be driving busses, selling insurance, and working the counter at Subway? (This whole premise was spawned by the misinterpretation of a sentence by the apostle John—we would hazard that our screenwriter has never actually read the Book of Revelation, but still thought it might make a good action movie.)

So, the Prince of Darkness, using the body of Gabriel Byrne, must impregnate his foreordained bride or lose his chance to take over. But to make it a challenge, he has to get busy and fertilize her deviled egg between the hour of 11:00 PM and midnight on December 31, 1999. Talk about performance anxiety!

Christine, as we learned earlier, was born in a public hospital with the loving assistance of a Satanist obstetrics staff. Immediately after her birth they made her suckle snake blood (the reason for this is never explained—maybe because it tastes better than Similac). Then they killed her parents and raised her in a gorgeous brownstone in the lap of luxury, where she was lovingly cared for by a demonic au pair who made sure that Christine did her homework, ate her vegetables, and drank her snake blood.

Meanwhile, as Arnold is protecting The Man, a frail old priest named Thomas Aquinas tries to mow him down. In an action sequence that endangers almost everyone in the city, Arnold barely manages to overcome the 90-year-old cleric, and desperately hopes he isn’t called upon to face even more fearsome assailants, like Grandma Moses, or Lambchop.

For the rest of the movie, everyone tries to either kill, kidnap, or rescue Christine, to variously prevent or further her little tryst with Satan, and the Unblessed Event that will result from it. But everybody is so intent on stopping the sex that apparently they forgot about birth control as a way to foil the devil’s plan. (Yes, this is the Catholic Church we’re talking about, but we doubt even the Pope would advocate the Rhythm Method when Lucifer turns up as your Mystery Date).

Then a lot of action-y stuff happens, most of it involving explosions, fires, and noise. In the course of all the violence we learn that all members of the NYPD are Satanists (big surprise).

The Man gets shot, burnt, thrown off a subway, etc., but it doesn’t really bother him because he’s made of liquid metal. Eventually, though, the bullets give him a rash, or he just gets tired of being Gabriel Byrne, because at 5 minutes before midnight on the 31st, while Arnold and Christine are holed up in a Cathedral and Arnold has just gotten his faith back, Lucifer possesses him. He still hasn’t given up on making the Beast With Two Backs and is going to use Arnold’s body to do it (but it’s going to have to be a quickie, since he doesn’t even begin to rip her clothes off until about a minute before the deadline). But wait—the movie told us that the devil had to father the child using Gabriel Byrnes’ pre-ordained body—so having Arnold rape the girl would make no sense! However, I guess it’s anything for a climax (no double entendre intended).

Just when it looks like we’re all going to hell, the girl tells Arnold to not give in to Satan and to just say no to drugs and stuff, and in a stunning deus ex machismo, Arnold manages to impale himself on the bric-a-brac. Having failed to get a date for New Years Eve, the Father of Lies returns to hell, where he spends the rest of the night sulking on the couch in his boxer shorts, knocking back tallboys of malt liquor and watching Shannon Tweed movies on Cinemax. Meanwhile, Arnold, who began the story as an atheist with a history of unsuccessful suicide attempts, has traveled a long, hard road to redemption, and is now a believer with a successful suicide under his belt. He goes to heaven, even though suicide is a mortal sin, thus proving that there’s an exception for people who commit suicide to avoid having sex. Unfortunately, this means that Arnold will be spending the rest of eternity with Robby Benson’s character from Ode to Billy Joe.