The final scene can make or break a movie. Today I won’t go into surprise endings such as in The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects which at first blow you away and later make you question whether the movie was really that good, or if it just had a fantastic conclusion. Instead I want to discuss how a seemingly minor change in the last scene can make a huge difference to its tone and to the viewer. To make my point I could use a typical geeky example such as the unicorn origami in Blade Runner’s director’s cut, but me being me, I want to talk about a forgotten film called Albino (aka Whispering Death aka The Night Of The Askari aka Death In The Sun). Many will argue that it should stay that way: forgotten.
Filmed while the Rhodesian bush war was raging, and told entirely from the colonial point of view, Albino is undoubtedly controversial. The plot revolves around an ex-police officer (James Faulkner) in Rhodesia who seeks revenge after his farm is burned down and his soon-to-be wife (Sybil Danning) is raped, murdered, and scalped by black terrorists (nowadays considered freedom fighters) led by an albino who froths at the mouth when he rapes. Side note: in Italy its title translates to “Frothing At The Mouth” – you can’t make this stuff up! Suffice to say that, the only way one can attempt to enjoy this movie nowadays is to try and forget modern day sensibilities, because by today's standards this movie is repugnant as all hell. But enough about the plot. Back to alternate endings. Needless to say, SPOILERS AHEAD.
The last scene in the original cut is politically charged. Both Faulkner and Danning’s characters are dead. Faulkner is being buried. Trevor Howard’s character says, “The dream is over” and the camera closes in to show their graves and two African children standing next to them. Social commentary which infers that peace between whites and blacks is no longer possible and that, due to strength in numbers, eventually the colonists will have to choose between dying or leaving the country to the natives. One wouldn’t expect any different from the author of the novel, Daniel Carney, who also wrote the similarly themed novel The Wild Geese. Rhodesia fell to the freedom fighters just 3 years after the movie was released.
A few years later, VHS became a huge moneymaker. The South African apartheid was constantly in the news. Home video companies didn’t want to touch a colonist-sympathizing film with a ten foot pole. Except for one company. A company that wears the reputation for releasing vile movies as a badge: Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma.
Known for making ultra-low budget horror films, Troma took this violent revenge movie and made it more brutal to turn it into a better fit for their catalogue. They did this by ending the movie on the close up of Faulkner’s face as he thrashes about after being massacred by Rhodesian SAS gunfire. This, inadvertently, made it less politically controversial. Which ending do you prefer?
Until a few years ago, this was the only commercially available copy of Albino. Thankfully a (bad) print of the original intact version was used for a DVD release that is readily available in Germany.
Imagine a world in which Troma had somehow managed to obtain the distribution rights for Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Would they have ended the film on the shot of Willem Dafoe being gunned down?
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