Thursday Movie Picks #431: Last Girl

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. We're still in October, which means another horror-inspired theme for the blogathon. This week, that theme is "Last Girl". Now, I can think of any number of "last man alive" movies, notably The Last Man on Earth which if memory serves was remade as The Omega Man and then got more remakes, although I may have the order of the movies wrong. "Last Girl" was rather tougher, although in the end I came up with one obvious horror, one movie that's generally thought of as sci-fi although I think it fits the horror genre, and one that's not normally thought of as horror:

The World, The Flesh, and the Devil (1959). If you think nuclear war is a horror, then this movie fits the genre, although it really plays out as a straight drama. Inger Stevens plays the "last girl" here, a survivor of nuclear war, although we don't see her first. That goes to Harry Belafonte, who survived the war too. He finds Stevens and begins to fall in love with her, race no longer mattering since it's not as if there's anybody else around to care. That is until white Mel Ferrer shows up.

House (1977). This Japanese horror movie tells of a high school girl who has a grandmother living out in the country in a big house. The young student invites six of her friends to spend the summer with her and her grandmother, but strange things start happening as the girls get killed off one by one. The movie has a dark premise, but it's presented in an almost campy fashion with everything being over the top, and is definitely an interesting viewing experience.

Alien (1979). Sigourney Weaver plays the "last girl" this time, being on a spacship that stops to investigate a transmission, only to realize too late that they've picked up an alien life form intent on killing the humans on board, Weaver being the last survivor. In space, no one can hear you scream.