it is a quite slow pace face-to-face Brynner/Douglas...i found there was some pretty heavy violence/gore but you know, seventies giallo style : (maybe some spoiler ahead) a little bit phony and fake but the image is there : the monkey torn apart, the flesh torn from the mechanic, etc...i don't remember if it is alike the novel...but overall i think it is a OK action flick, hero flick : he stands all alone at the end, all the bad guys are out..........and nice images too : a small rocky island, the sun over the seabut not a typical Verne's story-on-cinema : subs, sci-fi; but the adventure seen in a lot of Verne's novels tough

This is an adventure film based on a Jules Verne's novel about a pirate captain and his crew that take over a small island with a lighthouse on it; the idea is to turn out the light at night when ships are at sight so that they crash against the rocks and the pirates can easily steal everything from the passengers and the wrecked vessel. The point is that one of the lighthouse servers -the only survivor- manages to escape into the island and will try to ruin the pirates sinister plans.Though not a great film at all and a bit slow, "The Light at the End of the World" doesn't lack some sort of charm and interest perhaps because of the lone man's fight against the whole bunch of criminals all by himself and perhaps also because of the hostile and lonely atmosphere in which the action takes place.Kirk Douglas is the lonely fighter and Yul Brynner plays the flamboyant and deadly captain Kongre, leader of the pirates. The feminine touch is brought by Samantha Eggar as a survivor of a ship wreck that is captured by Kongre's men.Not a great adventure film, but sort of original and worth a look in my opinion for fans of the genre.The film was shot in the coast of Spain, but Verne's novel settles the action in the "Isla de los Estados", a small Argentine island a few miles east of its most southern province called "Tierra del Fuego" (Land of Fire) where you can still visit the lighthouse that inspired Verne.

Uneven and uneventful adventure in which a group of cruel pirates, led by Brynner, takes a far island and start a game of cat/and/mouse with the lighthouse keeper (Douglas). Interesting premise receives a juvenile treatment that spoiled all the real suspense. Brynner is good and malevolous. I give this a 5 (five).

As a young boy, I fell asleep at the drive-in while this movie was playing. It was part of a twin bill with "Twilight People", a very cheaply made version of "The Island of Dr Moreau". I had nightmares for years afterward. It wasn't because either of these movies were particularly scary--they weren't. I was mortified by how bad the acting, plot, & the writing were. It had something to do with pirates using a lighthouse to crash ships so that they could steal their treasure. Kirk Douglas was one of the people that lived on the island with the lighthouse. He had a monkey and hid in a cave on the edge of the cliff which conveniently had a hole in the floor. Gee, I wonder how that might fit into the film? When I say I had nightmares about this movie, I mean literally. It was not until I found it and "Twilight People" on video and relived the horror of these 2 awful films that the dreams ceased.