Written by Richard Matheson, William F Leicester
Produced by Robert L Lippert
Duration 86 minutes
Remakes. Multiple adaptations of the same novel. General lack of new ideas. All in all, it’s not rare for a movie viewer to find themselves watching something that is a version of something else they have already seen.
And I’m not just talking about newer versions – often it's an earlier release that they've ended up seeing after the modern one.
Such a thing happened with me and 1964’s
THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, based on the same novel I Am Legend as the 2007 Will
Smith film and Charlton Heston’s THE OMEGA MAN (1971) – both of which I’d seen
before this maiden viewing of LAST MAN. But while there were definitely familiar
plot points from those later movies, this first stab at putting the story on
film had enough of an identity to stand on its own creepy terms – despite
novelist Richard Matheson disowning his own screenplay adaptation and asking to
be credited under a pseudonym.
The movie kicks off in medias res with gloomy shots of deserted city locations. It’s a powerful start, with a cinematic use of empty space – what you don’t show; what's lurking beyond the frame. John Carpenter (aged 16 at the time) must have been taking notes. A church sign declares "The End Has Come!" – our first hint of just what the hell has happened here.
Our protagonist, Vincent Price, wakes up to an alarm clock. "Better get up," he grumbles in voiceover. "Time to make it through another day." I found it pretty amusing that he’s presented like a regular office drone who hates his job, but has to drag himself out of bed for it anyway. Then, checking his calendar: "Has it only been three years since I inherited the Earth? Seems like a million." The movie is a bit voiceover-heavy in the early stretch, but I guess the alternative would be him talking to himself out loud. Which, hey, after three years alone, you probably would be, just to hear a human voice.
Our man’s first morning duty? Round up the dead bodies outside his house to throw in ‘the pit’, an enormous quarry out of town. That and a perfunctory, lacklustre call out on the CB radio, on the off chance that today is the day that someone actually answers.
His day-to-day involves hunting down the undead creatures that roam the streets (who I guess were just outside of those empty opening shots). And for a while, the movie is merely Price's routine which, for the viewer, starts to risk being a bit overly … routine. He’s mostly just finding the undead in their beds (they sleep?) and giving them a right good stabbing. No stalking or real danger, so not much by way of tension.
And in the casting of oddball Price, our hero isn’t really what you'd call an everyman. Famous for things like HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959), WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968) and THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES (1971), but known to modern audiences for playing the mad scientist who makes sure Johnny Depp can craft hedge animals but not scratch his nose in EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (Price is a hero to Tim Burton) and for providing the cackling coda in Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’, the actor is sort of reminiscent of a demon himself. So, there's a risk in that early stretch of our sympathies actually lying with the ostensible antagonists.
Then Price starts to spend time missing his wife and daughter and having intermittent flashbacks to when they were still alive, so we kind of come round to him again, just in time for the sun to go down, at which point the outside world starts to resemble Croydon town centre on a Saturday night circa 1999, with stumbling and aggressive creatures crawling all over each other in an unsteady rage.
This is one of those horror movies where the creatures are called vampires, but they’re really more like zombies – see also FROM DUSK TILL DAWN (1996). Vince puts up mirrors and garlic to deter them, and they seek out his blood, but for all intents and purposes they’re the lumbering ghouls of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, which wouldn’t come along for another four years.
"There he is, get him!" one of them shouts. Holy shit, they talk? Seems like Price could have tried to reason with them in that case, I mean if they can express cognitive thought? Well, at this point, the rules for zombies (as these definitely are) were not yet fixed – George Romero admitted as much even by the time his NIGHT was released.
One problem with LAST MAN is that the flashing back to how this all happened (caused by a pandemic – eek!) starts to consume the narrative, and we’re over half way through before the story in Price’s present situation moves ahead at all. (It's the same problem that would later manifest itself in fellow 'last movie' THE LAST SEVEN.)
So in the end, the viewing experience turns out to be similar to what the coincidently named (or, rather, nicknamed) Rob Zombie gave us in his (risible) 2007 HALLOWEEN remake. It's like someone did a new version of I AM LEGEND and added far too much unasked-for backstory, leaving themselves with only about 25 minutes at the end to cram in a rushed version of the original. But LAST MAN still works, just about, and I was happy with the direction they went for the ending, which harks back to the source novel’s title and makes those suspicions about whether we are supposed to actually like Price rise right up again.
My biggest disappointment with the film was not in any way THE LAST MAN ON EARTH’S fault. When I saw it had an Italian director and a lot of Italian names in the cast and crew, and found out that it was filmed in Rome standing in for the US, I got rather excited – prematurely, it turned out.
You see, Italy has a great tradition of horror, ranging from the classy Dario Argento (SUSPIRIA, OPERA) and Mario Bava (BLACK SUNDAY, TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE), to gorehounds like Lucio Fulci (ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS, THE BEYOND), Ruggero Deodato (CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE PARK) and Umberto Lenzi (MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY, NIGHTMARE CITY).
Unfortunately, co-director of LAST MAN Ubaldo Ragono doesn’t have similar credentials, the only other feature on his CV being something unpromisingly titled SWEET SMELL OF LOVE. I therefore shouldn’t have been surprised when there was no eyeball implement, or maggots crawling out of stab wounds, or girls vomiting up their intestines (alright, those are all from Fulci movies, but he is my favourite Italian horror maniac).
So, I guess the lesson from I can take from this experience is … know what you’re going into any don’t get your hopes up that it will resemble something else?
Hmm. When has anyone every truly learned from that?
Three stars out of five.
Valid use of the word ‘last’? We don’t see any other men in the movie. That’s all I’m saying.
What would a movie about THE FIRST MAN ON EARTH be about? Too easy to go with another Biblical reference. Maybe instead, the first man to cultivate the soil for growing crops, and so really get ‘on’ that there earth?
Previously: LAST TRAIN FROM GUN HILL
Next time: ABOUT LAST NIGHT
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