Last week I looked at the legendarily bad Plan 9 From Outer Space and the sadly forgotten Invisible Invaders both of which are forerunners to the modern zombie genre that George Romero kicked off with his classic Night of the Living Dead in the late 1960s. This week, we’ll look at The Last Man on Earth which also informed Romero’s movies, more so than anything else. The poster makes it look like another clunky Poe pastiche that Vincent Price used to crank out with Roger Corman, but it’s nothing of the sort. There’s none of the ham-bone staginess of Corman’s costume dramas. No ghosts or specters. It takes place in the current day circa 1964. There’s a pandemic and panic and the end of the world brought to you by your former family, friends and neighbors who are now a ravening horde of zombie-like vampires!
The movie is based on the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson which was originally published in 1954. I think of how early that was and how horror films at the time were mainly about the bomb and invaders from space. Here was Matheson way ahead of the curve writing about apocalypse by virus and monsters escorting the remnants of society off to oblivion. The chilling part was that the monsters are or were recently us.
The Last Man on Earth was the first of three filmed versions of this book. The second filmed version was The Omega Man with a machine gun toting Charlton Heston fighting a horde of Marxist, albino cult members in robes. It feels more like the sci-fi/action films of the ’80s rather than a zombie film. The latest version was the Will Smith starring vehicle I Am Legend. That film has some beautiful vistas of a deserted New York, but it’s decision to make the vampire hordes computer generated sabotages the spirit of the film. The monsters are hyperactive, overly rubbery, obviously artificial others that are emotionally easy to gun down. They are the bad guys. The Indians to Smith’s lone cowboy. Tenpins made of pixels designed for the star to bowl down. The makers of the film missed the point. The vampires are us or were us. They would have been better off with a battalion of extras and several gallons of grease paint.
Embedded below is the movie The Last Man on Earth. It sort of looks like a dress rehearsal for Night of the Living Dead. Of course, this has the wonderful Vincent Price who takes the material seriously as he always did being the consummate professional, but he looks a little out of place what with his regal bearing, perfect mustache and his adherence to a dress code despite the world ending.
This is another film that has lapsed into the public domain. It’s readily available. You can probably find a DVD of it at a dollar store for a dollar. Head on over to the Internet Archive to either download or watch a streaming version of this movie for free. It’s on Netflix and available on a number of the freebie channels on the Roku. Check it out! With the fear of SARS and bird flu in recent years, The Last Man on Earth seems more current and contemporary than the modern zombie gut-muncher.
