The End of August at the Hotel Ozone

It was a pretty strange science-fiction double feature, two films that none of us had ever heard of — and we thought we’d heard of everything! Out into the heart of a blizzard, we drove to the theatre across several miles in blinding snow, a severe winter back some thirty years ago. And other than ourselves there were just four people in the audience, a man and woman with two children who ended up leaving half an hour into the first movie, Peter Watkins’s The War Game (1965). Perhaps they were expecting Forbidden Planet.

    But Watkins’s existential parable paled in comparison to the second feature, a chilling Czech import called The End of August at the Hotel Ozone (1966). I tried researching it beforehand but to no avail. This was the real deal, a true obscurity that escaped the notice of even the most ardent SF fans.

    The opening credits claimed that it was produced by the Czechoslovakian Army (!). Like good soldiers, we remained at attention for ninety-odd minutes as a group of barbaric young women are led by their mother across a land wiped out by nuclear war. The old woman keeps speaking of the glories of the past, as if to instill a sense of values into her daughters. But all they want to do is kill. And kill. And kill. Animal lovers be forewarned: live creatures were sacrificed for the sake of the scenario. It isn’t pretty.

    During the credits, I’d scribbled down the names of the director and writer, but could find very little on them back then. Director Jan Schmidt had received good notice for his short film, Josef Kilián (1963), while Pavel Jurácek had written the screenplay for Ikarie XB 1 (1963), which made it to America under the title, Voyage to the End of the Universe.

    The film fell out of sight for decades. A bootleg DVD surfaced a couple of years ago, though without English subtitles. Anyone unfamiliar with it couldn’t catch the poetry of the old woman’s narration. Hopefully, that’ll soon change: Facets Video plans to release it on DVD on January 31.

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