Italy/USA, NR, 86
m, 1964
The peerlessly urbane Vincent Price seems oddly cast as the titular character in The Last Man on Earth (1964), a cut-rate vampire/zombie flick based on the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. But even though Price may not be the first thespian you’d think of to play an eradicator of bloodsucking freaks, he turns out to be just the right glue to hold all this hokum together. For a part like Robert Morgan, a scientist fighting to survive all by his lonesome in a post-apocalyptic world run by the undead, a compelling screen presence is precisely what’s required—and Price has so much presence that he holds our attention even when he has little more to do than sit around and bemoan his friendless plight with a bottle of scotch. Though the action in Matheson’s tome has been opened up a bit in its transition to the screen (courtesy of the scribe himself, amongst others), Price is still placed in the unenviable position of having to act sans co-stars for some pretty long stretches. And it’s in moments like those where Price’s ability to communicate a character’s inner life (not exactly abetted here by some superfluous narration) truly pays off. The Last Man on Earth unfolds enigmatically. Through the gaps of a boarded-up window, we find Morgan passed out in the living room of his tumbledown address. An alarm clock goes off, and he grudgingly pulls himself together. “Another day,” Morgan sighs. “Better get started.” After marking off the date on a hand-drawn calendar, he shuffles into the garage and adds some fuel to a generator. He then checks the pungency of a garlic wreath hanging on the front door (which is also adorned with crucifixes and broken mirrors). He transmits a greeting over his short-wave radio, but receives only static in return. He flicks on a lathe and fashions some wooden stakes. He collects the dead bodies littering his front lawn and throws them into the back of his Chevy wagon. He taxies the corpses to the edge of town and tosses them into a perpetually blazing crater. It’s been three years of this shit. Three years since nearly every man, woman and child on Earth perished in a devastating plague, leaving mixed-up vampire-zombies in their stead. Morgan, we learn, has been methodically searching his town block by block for the nests in which these monsters steal their daytime naps. His mission (probably aggravated as much by flat-out boredom as self-preservation) is to annihilate each and every one of them. (But what about all the vampire-zombies kickin’ it in nearby communities? Surely the walking dead aren’t afraid to cross county lines.) There’s a groovy montage that depicts Morgan the Vampire Slayer seeking out his prey and then doing them in with his homemade spikes and one very big mallet. But when the sun begins to drop, Morgan must rush back home. The nasty pricks come out at night, thirsting for mortal blood. They flock to Morgan’s house like moths to a light bulb, and pound away (rather listlessly) on his door with sticks and two-by-fours. Morgan throws on some tunes to help drown out their ruckus and waits for the sun to come back so he can recommence his killing spree. (He should take advantage of the creatures’ nocturnal visits to rub a few more of them out.) I’m not sure why Morgan doesn’t keep mobile; every goon and his brother by now knows of Morgan’s whereabouts, so naturally they’re going to call on him come feeding time. In one scene, Morgan gets caught snoozing in a cemetery after dark, but instead of staying put in the seemingly impenetrable crypt where he was lighting a candle for his departed loved ones, he makes a dash for his car, exposing himself to a ravenous throng of the scruffy creeps. But have no fear; it doesn’t take much to fight through these guys. They just kind of lumber around with their arms outstretched, putting one very much in the mind of sleepwalking hobos. So how in the hell did all this begin? Well, there’s a protracted flashback that fills us in, but I think it was a mistake to include it. As Morgan revisits some raggedy home movies, we venture back to happier days when he was enjoying success both as an epidemiologist and as the head of a regular “Ozzie and Harriet” household. But word soon arrives that a peculiar bacterium is doing in the population of Europe, and it isn’t long before it hits the shores of America. (The film was actually shot in Italy.) Despite Morgan’s best attempts to find a cure, the plague snuffs out his six-year-old daughter, Kathy (Christi Courtland), whose dead body is collected by the National Guard and then dumped unceremoniously into the aforementioned bonfire. Soon, the angels come for Morgan’s missus, Virginia (Emma Danieli), as well as his best friend and colleague, Ben Cortman (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart). But both are spared incineration and rise from their graves to join the swelling population of parasitical night owls. Our hero (who somehow acquired an immunity to the disease) is eventually the last man standing, which brings us back to where we first found him. Things take an unexpected turn, however, when he spots a young woman running through his neighborhood in broad daylight. Now, if you expect me to sidestep those irksome spoilers, I can’t give away much more of the plot. What I will disclose is that there’s a great little flip towards the end (on par with Angel Heart or The Sixth Sense), but director Sidney Salkow’s handling of it (as well as the rest of the picture) is so flat that it doesn’t provoke the goose bumps that it should. Still, it’s easy to see how The Last Man on Earth inspired many of the zombie flicks that trailed it, particularly George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968 and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later in 2002. Despite the miserable budget appropriated by AIP, The Last Man on Earth touts some fine effects. There’s a persuasive sense of far-reaching desolation, especially in the picture’s establishing shots. Yes, the vampire-zombies (vampies? zombires?) look a trace silly by today’s standards, but I think that years of winking imitations have taken the edge off of what surely gave moviegoers a jolt back in the mid-60s. The Omega Man, a 1972 take on Matheson’s novel starring Chuck Heston, has been seen by more audiences than The Last Man on Earth, but it isn’t half as chilling. Nor does it have Price, who, at least in the realm of B-grade monster mash, is always right. April 6, 2005 © Copyright 2007 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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