FUTURE WORLD (2018)

My guess is that James Franco saw The Bad Batch one day last year and said, "Psssh! I can do better than that." For all I know, he'd seen Mad Max:Fury Road some time before and had the same reaction. If you really want to speculate on his influences, you might find Future World reminiscent of the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Cyborg. On the DVD, Franco drily explains that he wanted to experiment with the postapocalypse genre, as if it were his ambition -- it might well be -- to direct in every genre known to man. He shares the directorial credit here with his frequent cinematographer Bruce Thierry Cheung, and while Cheung is also one of the credited writers Franco makes it clear on the disc that he was involved in putting the story together. Not that that took much effort, as Future World is more a collection of tropes and an exercise in style than anything else. There's been an apocalypse, and while bullets have become extremely rare there's fuel enough to keep motorcycling marauders on the road, massacring most everyone they find and partying at Big Daddy Love Lord's (Snoop Dogg) poontang oasis. There's a real oasis somewhere nearby that the marauders, led by a horned-helmeted Franco, somehow have never stumbled upon, but it's benevolent ruler (a supine Lucy Liu) is ill with the dreaded Red Fever, the cure for which reportedly can be had at the legendary Paradise Beach. It's there that Prince -- it seems to be both his title and his name (Jeffrey Wahlberg) -- is bound with a precious handful of bullets that are promptly taken from him by Franco's gang after the naive hero makes the mistake of stopping at the big whorehouse. A more impressive acquisition of Franco's is the android Ash (Suki Waterhouse, late of The Bad Batch), a killing machine of the bad old days who apparently shut herself down in an act of protest against mankind's wars. Unfortunately for her -- and she's not only very female but also, as a matter of cliche by now, lesbian -- once she's awakened Franco can control her by yelling into a little control box. Collaborating with Big Daddy, he sends Ash to roll the hapless Prince. The poor youth is allowed to live only because Franco needs someone to lead him to the oasis, but in the course of an escape attempt Ash ends up out of range of the remote control gizmo and becomes Prince's staunch ally.

Alas, since the days of postcards Paradise Beach has become Drug Town, presided over by a coked-up Milla Jovovich, and while she does have a cure for the Red Fever, it has a high price. First, she intends to take custody of Ash, intending her either as a sex toy or an object of worship, or both. Then, she insists that Prince shoot up some heavy drugs and battle her champion in a gladiatorial combat which our questionably experienced hero, malnourished, injured and drug-addled, somehow wins when Ash tosses him a machete. That spoils Jovovich's fun a little, but what really ticks her off is that her captive techie Lei (Margarita Levieva) scores with Ash before she gets a chance. Worse yet, the Franco gang, having little sense of direction, mistakes Drug Town for the oasis and attacks. There's a great goofy moment here when Jovovich shoots herself up with two syringes of something to inspire a  battle frenzy befitting the impending clash of titans, but however you rate the relative prowess of action movie stars, Franco puts himself over in the fateful encounter. In the end, though, Ash rebels against his control when he orders her to execute Prince and Lei and, as women everywhere presumably cheer, she puts the fiend down once and for all. After delivering the chaste Prince back home in time to save his mom, Ash and Lei ride off, theoretically in search of other androids and further adventures, as if this were a pilot for some series. Given its ghost of a release and its atrocious score on Rotten Tomatoes, it's safe to say we won't see more of these heroines. But while I concede every failing of this project, especially its absolute lack of originality, I couldn't help liking it for its earnestness, its impressive outdoor cinematography by Werner Herzog's latter-day cameraman, Pieter Zeitlinger, and the very throwback spirit that most likely provoked others' contempt. I still enjoy a bit of postapocalyptic cheese every so often, and if you can't have a Mad Max every couple of years a James Franco pastiche will do for a little while.

THE WORTHY (2016)

Americans, Europeans and Japanese share a wide range of post-apocalyptic fantasies, but it's unusual to see similar fantasies from other countries. Here's one from the United Arab Emirates, albeit shot in Romania, and to be honest there's nothing really unique about Ali F. Mostafa's film or VikramWeet's screenplay except the location. It's supposed to be somewhere in the Middle East, though it could be narrowed down further depending on how you interpret one character's reference to the "home of the religions of God." God hasn't smiled on the old home ground lately; civilization has collapsed and most water supplies are hopelessly contaminated. One small band of survivors have holed up in an abandoned airplane factory that they've made into a fortress with its own convenient plumbing system. You can't trust strangers, as patriarch Idrees (Samer al Masri) learns when he opens the gate to aid a fragile looking female, only to be faced with her master who uses her as a hostage to extort water our little band. Such negotiations as they are fall apart, but another stranger, also with a woman in tow, appears fortuitously to rescue Idrees, taking a friendly-fire bullet in the process. This is Mussa (Samer Ismail); his sidekick is Gulbin (Maisa Abd Elhadi), a Kurd whom only Mussa can understand.

Outside and inside one of civilization's last redoubts with the cast of The Worthy.

Mussa's heroism earns him a meal and some meatball surgery, but he's made to understand that if he and Gulbin intend to stay he has to abide by Idrees's rules. He quickly shows that he intends to recognize no master but himself, throwing the group into panicked disarray. Leaving Gulbin behind, he moves to assert control over the facility by cutting off the water supply. The film spirals out of control at this point, turning Mussa into the typical thriller supervillain, almost limitlessly versatile at setting traps on short notice. Worse, he has a point to make as he picks people off one and two at a time in an attempt to find one who might be "worthy" of joining forces with him and others who plan to rebuild society in their own Darwinian image.

More an international production than an authentic product of any particular culture, The Worthy is slickly generic, benefitting from nice production design and cinematography by Adrian Silisteanu. Mostafa's direction is reasonably suspenseful and from what I could tell from watching a subtitled version of the film he got good work from his actors. But like most post-apocalypse films since Mad Max, Worthy is too into the thrills of de-civilized existence to have anything real to say about social disintegration. That wouldn't be a problem if Mostafa had made a great action film, but by the climactic confrontation on a teetering airplane wing, with Idrees's daughter Maryam Rakeen Saad) chained and noosed at one end and Mussa at the other, threatening to jump off and let Maryam hang as her brother Eissa (Mahmoud al-Atrash) watches from the middle, the action had become cartoonish. A twist at the end leaves the story open-ended, raising the prospect of a sequel reversing the original situation as a vengeful survivor infiltrates the enemy's base, but I doubt whether Worthy will leave people wanting another chapter of the story.

DVR Diary: THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR (1975)

Because the post-apocalyptic community in Robert Clouse's film is led by a man known as "The Baron" (Max von Sydow), there may be a temptation to see The Ultimate Warrior as a distant precursor to the current TV series Into the Badlands, in which parts of the onetime U.S. are divided among a group of Barons. That would make Carson (Yul Brynner) the original Clipper, but in Clouse's picture, which he wrote as well as directed, warriors like Carson are mercenaries rather than feudal vassals. He appears in a ruined city -- civilization has collapsed, a la No Blade of Grass, due to a plant-killing plague, among other things -- and makes himself conspicuous, standing shirtless on a prominent ledge, to declare his availability. Ultimately Carson is just passing through on his way to relatives on an island off the Carolina coast, but the idea of a distant safe haven with a more natural landscape appeals to the Baron, whose prime asset is the ultimate gardener (Richard Kelton), to whom the little barony owes a precious crop of fresh veggies. That crop is hopelessly vulnerable to the depredations of such human vermin as Carrot (William Smith) and his gang; hence the appeal of an ultimate warrior, not only to safeguard the crop and its gardener, but possibly as an escort for a breakout to that island, where the gardener could raise larger crops. The situation, from the security of the garden to the Baron's grip on his people, proves unsustainable, forcing Carson to make his break with nothing but a bag of seeds, a pregnant woman and his own very special skills.

Clouse directed the non-combat action of Enter the Dragon and thus, following Bruce Lee's death, was typed as a martial-arts expert in his own right. He was hired to try to put over martial-arts talent, from Dragon co-star Jim Kelly (Black Belt Jones) to Jackie Chan (The Big Brawl) to Kurt Thomas (the infamous Gymkata) to Cynthia Rothrock (China O'Brien). As a martial-arts director, Clouse presumably was only as good as his talent, and 55 year old Yul Brynner could only be an ultimate warrior in a relative, very specific context. Fighting skills have deteriorated with every other aspect of civilization by Carson's time, so that being able to sidestep and stab or slash accurately with a fairly modest knife is enough to establish his ultimacy. You might have seen William Smith mentioned as his ultimate antagonist and thought, "Good lord, Smith should kill Brynner with his bare hands," but Carrot turns out to be the sort of villain who leads from behind until he's the last man left standing. At that point he pulls out a ball and chain and puts up something of a fight before falling into a hole. Brynner, apparently coasting on a sex appeal that had been mysteriously re-established by his robotic turn in Westworld, is in reasonable shape for a man his age, but by the frightening standard set that decade for his age group by Charles Bronson in Chato's Land you could well doubt whether Carson is any more ultimate in any physical situation than Jim Hellwig, the war-painted inheritor of his title, was during the late 1980s.

Fortunately for all involved, The Ultimate Warrior is less a martial-arts picture -- though I wondered whether it began with an idea Clouse had for Bruce Lee -- than a sincere post-apocalyptic dystopia. Perhaps necessarily, it is less interested in choreographed sensationalism than with conveying a truly depleted society near the end of its rope. It's a demoralizing picture, perhaps especially for anyone going in expecting epic action, and that proves to be a good thing, even if I'm reluctant to call this a good movie. A sense of Seventies-ish exhaustion hangs over all the proceedings, including the tired performances of Brynner and von Sydow, who actually play off each other quite well, with Brynner refreshingly relaxed in their dialogue scenes. Von Sydow, early in a run of odd career choices, is persuasive as someone who's a good leader in theory but not really in practice, benevolent and selfish at the same time, someone who could help save civilization but not secure it. Smith, meanwhile, is ironically effective as a largely inactive villain, since his inactivity leaves you questioning Carrot's courage or competence until he finally has to fight it out with Carson. Overall, compared with what would come just a few years later, The Ultimate Warrior seems calculated not to romanticize the fall of civilization by making it primarily a liberation of violent impulses. Even when it's not really satisfactory as a genre picture, there's still something decent about it, even if only in a passive, negative sense, that's worth saluting.

Too Much TV: THE 100 (2014-present)

Superhero fans who tuned into the CW network, first to watch Smallville and now to watch Arrow and Flash, learned over time that for their favorite shows to survive, apparently they had to conform to a so-called CW formula and become stereotypical CW shows. This entailed catering to the female gaze with shots of shirtless men and to the (presumably) female sensibility with soap-operaesque elements like romantic triangles and an unforgiving attitude toward keeping secrets. These had to be permanent parts of the program, comic book fans conceded with different degrees of grudging, if the superhero shows were to survive. What, then, to make of The 100, which flips this assumption on its head? The CW's postapocalyptic drama established its network bona fides early on but quickly went on to become almost the antithesis of a CW show. It remains one in the formulaic sense only insofar as the protagonists are young people who would be deemed pretty when they aren't covered in mud, blood or war paint. It has gone so far from the formula or stereotype that when we did get a sex scene near the end of the second season -- the finale aired March 11 -- it was jarring because that sort of thing hadn't happened on The 100 for a long time. Meanwhile, the show's growing fandom deemed it The CW's answer to Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead. The most fanatical dare compare it favorably to those pantheon shows. I can't judge, but there's certainly a similarity in tone that makes 100 an outlier on the CW schedule and most likely --since I don't watch the entire schedule -- its best show.

The 100 (fwiw, it's pronounced "the hundred," not "the one hundred") is historically part of the YA-dystopia trend for which The Hunger Games set the tone. Jason Rothenberg based the show with progressive looseness on a novel by Kass Morgan, who has written a sequel since the show debuted in which at least one character appears whom the show has killed. The situation is that a cluster of space stations has preserved human civilization for almost a century since a nuclear war on the surface of Earth. The "Ark's" oxygen systems are beginning to fail; soon there won't be enough air for all the people on board. While some of the political leadership considers drastic steps to save oxygen by killing people, an alternative plan develops to test whether the surface is once more habitable. Since no one's that certain about it, the idea is to send 100 expendable people -- juvenile offenders who would have been killed under the Ark's draconian justice system -- to Earth as canaries in the proverbial mineshaft. The plan has the virtue of getting 100 sets of lungs off the Ark no matter how the kids' exploration of Earth turns out. Our main character is Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor), who becomes a de facto leader of the kids on the ground by virtue of her tie to Abby (Paige Turco), a doctor and political leader who's a true believer in the project. They want to prove that the planet is habitable in order to get everyone on the ground before more are killed in the Ark's hysterical political environment. On the Ark, Abby's main antagonist is Marcus Kane (Henry Ian Cusick), a control freak who sometimes seems overeager to reduce the surplus population. On the ground, Clarke's antagonist proves to be Bellamy Blake (Bob Morley), who was condemned for harboring a secret sister (Octavia, played by Marie Avgeropoulos) in defiance of the Ark's one-child policy. While Clarke and her allies want to establish order, Bellamy sees the situation as an opportunity to break free from adult constraints, the kids becoming a law unto themselves.

Obviously the earth is habitable once more or else there wouldn't be much of a show. In fact, it's been habitable for quite a while, since the kids soon discover people (as well as various mutated monsters) who've been living in a new tribal society for generations. These "grounders" are hostile to the intruders, but an outsider among them, Lincoln (Ricky Whittle) befriends Octavia (after initially kidnapping her) and tries to act as an intermediary between his people and the "Sky people." Many grounders speak fluent 21st century American English but also lapse into their own recently-evolved patois; it's a rare element of comic relief when you can make out the slang origins of the tribal tongue while subtitles make their meaning clear to viewers. But there was little funny about the contacts of grounders and sky people in the first season, which climaxed with a mass attack which the 100 (actually a good deal less by then) repelled by igniting rocket fuel and killing hundreds of grounders.

In the post-battle confusion Clarke and others on both sides were captured by a third force and imprisoned on Mount Weather, where people went underground at the time of the war and preserved as much of civilization and technology as they could. The "mountain men" remain very susceptible to the residual radiation on the surface but dream of walking in the sunlight once more. Their scientists have experimented on grounders, hoping to extract some key to immunity from radiation. The sky people make even more promising subjects. The second season featured (without overstating) parallel generational struggles. In the mountain, President Dante Wallace (Raymond J. Berry) is overthrown by his son Cage (Johnny Whitworth) because he's reluctant to adopt Cage's emergency plan to extract the captive sky-people's bone marrow without their consent and at the likely cost of their lives. Once Clarke escapes from the mountain, she struggles to reassert her hard-won authority against her own mother, who has reached the surface with many other Arkers in escape pods. Discovering that Mt. Weather has many grounders imprisoned for experimentation, while others are turned into drug-addicted Reapers who hunt more grounders, and having escaped with her onetime enemy, the grounder chieftain Anya (Dichen Lachman), Clarke hopes to forge an alliance with the grounders to storm the mountain and liberate all its prisoners. With major complications along the way, the season builds toward an epic siege of Mt. Weather that turns under increasingly desperate circumstances into a war of extermination.

The 100 has earned a reputation, not to mention comparisons with the acclaimed shows mentioned earlier, as a program that goes there, that doesn't find the easy out of bad situations that would let characters keep their consciences clear. Clarke has to get her hands, and often the rest of her, both literally and figuratively dirty as she learns to be a leader in an unliberal world. It's also a show where, if anything can go wrong, it probably will. Clarke's idea of an alliance is almost aborted at the beginning, for instance, when newly placed Ark guards at her old camp shoot down Anya, mistaking both her and Clarke for hostiles. She has to steel herself to be ruthless, most recently under the mentorship of Lexa (Alycia Debnam Carey), the grounder Commander chosen Dalai Lama style to fit the show's pattern of powerful young women. Clarke has had to personally execute the man she loves in order to keep the peace. She has had to join Lexa in a conspiracy of silence that condemned dozens of their peoples to violent death Coventry style rather than betray to Mt. Weather by evacuating them from the target of a missile attack that they have an infiltrator inside the mountain. Most recently she has had to decide whether to kill all the denizens of Mt. Weather, including children, by flooding the complex with surface radiation in order to save her own people from death by bone-marrow extraction. That decision comes after she shot a captive Dante Wallace dead in an attempt to intimidate Cage into surrender, and that decision comes after Lexa taught her a final lesson in ruthless leadership by making a separate peace with the mountain, getting her people back while leaving the sky people to die. And for what it's worth, that comes after Lexa, who had outed herself as lesbian in an earlier episode, seduced Clarke and received no worse rebuff than that Clarke, very understandably, wasn't ready yet. All these experiences weigh heavily on our heroine, but Eliza Taylor bears the burden heroically, making Clarke one of the strongest heroines on TV.

While Clarke has an epic learning curve to climb, what really elevates The 100 is the way the show has let other characters evolve past our first impressions. Remember those antagonistic males from the early episodes? Marcus Kane has grown compassionately self-critical since then, realizing that he'd condemned people who probably didn't have to die, and has emerged as a voice of reason on the series. At the extreme moment of this week's season finale, while a chained captive in the mountain, he promises to get his people to donate bone marrow voluntarily (which was something like Dante Wallace's original idea) if Cage will only free them. Marcus has also stood up for Clarke against Abby, who is too often tempted to see the kids' leader as her little girl gone morally astray. Meanwhile, Bellamy (who is Clarke's love interest in the books) quickly developed a conscience and a sense of responsibility not just for his sister but for the rest of the kids. Most recently he's been the Die Hard style infiltrator inside Mt. Weather and the sky person most hopeful of sparing the mountain's innocent kids come the reckoning. In that time Bob Morley has developed the character impressively into a laconic all-business action hero. Bellamy's sister Octavia has gone native more than any of the original 100, thanks to her love of Lincoln, and has transformed from one of the most helpless characters into a savagely elegant warrior. Jasper Jordan (Devon Bostick), almost comically hapless in the first season, became a heroically wrathful figure as he emerged as the leader of the captives in the mountain after Clarke's escape. Most unexpectedly, perhaps the most-hated character of the first season, the murderous traitor John Murphy (Richard Harmon) has become almost an audience favorite as he flinches from the more unfathomably vicious behavior of supposed good guys but retains a sardonic to-hell-with-everything attitude. He'll figure more prominently next season as the sole surviving companion of Theolonius Jaha (Isiah Washington), the former Ark leader and last man to escape to Earth who led a mostly doomed quest to find a fabled City of Light and most likely met the Season Three big bad instead.

If Jaha has seemed to go mad during his quest, he isn't the worst case of a good guy gone bad. In fact, it's while Murphy watched with perhaps more shock than horror that Finn Collins (Thomas McDonell), Clarke's boyfriend (but also the beloved of the kids' late-arriving tech whiz Raven Reyes [Lindsey Morgan]), believing Clarke a captive of the grounders early in the second season, hysterically massacred a bunch of frightened villagers, including children. Finn had been the voice of peace and reason almost ad nauseum throughout the first season, but his second-season arc (culminating in the execution scene I mentioned above) showed that while the ordeal of survival might mature some people, or even wisen up elders, it can also break good people or drive them mad. Finn's death was also a major milestone for The 100 because it decisively decoupled the series from the sort of teen-drama storylines that supposedly defined  CW programming. Not until Raven took a breather to get it on with a new boyfriend, apparently to cater to shippers who wanted to see more of the latter character, was there anything like romance on the show, unless you count Lexa's kiss of Clarke as something more than a political maneuver or a publicity stunt by the producers. To borrow the spiel from Arrow, The 100 had become something else. It's The CW's most uncompromising genre show, one that genre fans can watch without apology or embarrassment, and with maybe one exception that you'll learn of shortly, it's the best current series I watch, if not one of the best shows running. It'll be back this fall for a third season with its players increasingly scattered across a world full of menaces, as we learned in the latest cliffhanger, still waiting to be discovered.

Mill Creek Invasion: ESCAPE FROM GALAXY 3 (1981)

Now this is why I buy Mill Creek box sets. Bitto Albertini's space opera is no mere Star Wars knockoff. Watching it, I had the feeling that it was even more of a Starcrash rip-off, a second degree of exploitation, than a homage to Lucas's original. And wouldn't you know: in many European markets, Escape was in fact marketed as Starcrash II. It apparently uses some effects footage from the older film, and apes it in its vision of a galaxy of kings and emperors, a heroine named "Star," a frizzy-haired man of action and some strenuous genre-bending. It may in fact surpass Starcrash in raw stupidity, to such an extent that it may rival its model for entertainment value.

A long galaxy ago, in a time far, far away, the planet Ixilon, ruled by benevolent King Zenon (?), is under attack by Oraclon, the "powerful king of the night" (Don Powell, a onetime Hollywood dancer who also composed the score for this film). From his appearance, Oraclon earned his kingdom by being a kind of beacon in the darkness, from his glittery beard to a costume out of the Golden Age of Comics. But he wants more, and despite Princess Belle Star's assurance that "we'll overcome the dark forces of evil," Zenon prepares for the worst.

Oraclon kinda reminds me of the old Psycho-Pirate in DC Comics. He certainly runs the gamut of emotions.

After some desultory maneuvering and laser combat in space, he delegates Belle (Sherry aka Cheryl Buchanan) to be his ambassador to the Antaen Empire, a potential ally, with loyal lunkhead Lithian (James Milton) as her protector. In the confusion of battle our heroes make good their escape while Ixilon goes down fighting, even though Oraclon has technology that enables him to look into the cockpit of their escape craft.

 

Belle Star and Lithian flank their doomed monarch above, and fly their way out of Dodge below.

Both sides have a lot of technology to throw around, and one of the joys of the English version is the avalanche of technobabble, with special emphasis on the babble. Try some samples:

Oraclon: Prepare the uranium vapor rockets!

Zenon: We'll throw up a shield of mega-rays.

Oraclon: Use the hypersolar missile systems!

Lithian: The hydrogen booster units are already at 6000 mega-degrees.

Lithian: We're protected by the omega unit.

Oraclon: Use omegametric teleprobes and scan the whole eastern galaxy! Wait!...Including the equidistant conic tangents!

Oraclon excels at overall villain rant, e.g. "You galactic idiots! Imbeciles! Belle Star and Lithian are excaping! We are not returning to base, until I have their heads at my feet." But despite his big talk the good guys manage to excape all the way to a strange blue planet with a oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. They appear to have landed in the middle of a peplum, on a planet populated by people in togas and tunics. But the architecture is somewhere between Hobbitown and Munchkin Land, and the environment is strange and terrifying to the newcomers.

Lithian: What is this stuff?


Belle Star: It's water! I once saw some in my father's collection of intergalactic minerals.


Lithian: What do you use it for?

A slow learner throughout, Lithian flees in fright when the princess playfully splashes some of the alien substance his way. But their idyll is short-lived once the primitives gather up their courage to surround the strangers and capture them. Lithian reminds Belle that he could have dispersed the rabble with his beta-ray, but Princess Star holds out hope that they can prove their friendliness before they're condemned to be burned at the stake. That's a good hunch, since Lithian soon has an opportunity to make a superhuman vertical leap to save a child from falling off a cliff. He'll later show that he has superhuman strength when he helps the villagers build a dam by tossing boulders into a river. Belle has super strength as well, and both heroes can shoot beams of energy from their fingers when the writer remembers that they can. But basically, like most aliens in Euro sci-fi, they may as well be magical creatures who can do whatever the director can afford to show them doing.

If this is how the male Eloi of post-apocalyptic Peplum Earth react to Lithian in his costume, how will they react when he reveals his loinclothed manliness?

Life on Ixilon was long and dull. We learn that Belle and Lithian are immortal, but like most non-humans, have never kissed and never had sex -- nor, as we've seen, have they ever bathed. Belle proves a quick study in the ways of this strange new world -- bravely taking nude showers in the local waterfall definitely speeds things along -- while I've already mentioned Lithian's more protracted learning curve. Belle tries to demonstrate the pleasures of the body, but leaves that task to the local females when he seems uninterested in her. For a reel or so Escape turns into a sci-fi sex comedy -- and to be specific, it's a post-apocalyptic sex comedy. The village elder informs his guests that his people are the sole survivors of an ancient civilization, and when Oraclon finally shows up, his scan confirms a long-ago burst of intense radiation typical of a destructive war. It all adds up pretty quickly: Star Wars/Starcrash ripoff, postapocalyptic peplum, genre sex comedy. It's a cult-movie trash-heap paradise.

But no sooner have the earthlings celebrated life with a charmingly awkward bump and grind ensemble in the old peplum spirit, and no sooner have our heroes realized, upon finally doing the dirty with each other instead of strangers, that they are no longer immortal, than Oraclon shows up again to rain on the parade with lasers and bombs. Belle and Lithian can save their new home only by offering themselves up to their enemy, who cackles at the thought of their eternal servitude -- little does he know. Meanwhile, the good guys still have a card up their sleeves. They'll use sex as a weapon. Belle puts the moves on Oraclon, offering him a different kind of servitude. As he accepts the offer, Lithian becomes a kind of blue-eyed monster. Is this something he could have done before, or has jealousy and/or sex given him new powers? I'll leave the answer to the Monday morning quarterbacks. All I know is that when he zaps Belle while she's lip-locked with Oraclon, it's good night King of the Night. He's not just relegated to the ash-heap of history; he becomes the ash-heap of history! Good triumphs once again!

As long as you know what you're getting into, it's hard to hate this film. It's so enthusiastically and unselfconsciously stupid that the enthusiasm overwhelms the stupidity. Well, maybe not, but the stupidity actually factors into the enthusiasm and carries you along. Escape From Galaxy 3 has a certain childish charm, despite its arguably adult elements, and that exuberant naivete transcends the cynicism you'd think would be inherent in a Starcrash ripoff. It is definitely one of the dumbest movies you'll ever see, but that's what's fun about it. It's dumb but not dull, and for a film like this, that's probably all you can ask for. Escape is easily the most entertaining stage of the Mill Creek Invasion so far, but there's still much more to come.

Wendigo Meets STAKE LAND (2011)

While my friend Wendigo is the real vampire-movie fan, he sometimes doesn't know about the lower-profile indy vampire films until I happen to stumble upon them. That was the case earlier this year when I mentioned that a low-budget vamp movie was getting rave reviews down in New York City. He hadn't heard of Stake Land at that point, and didn't really remember my mentioning it when I showed him the DVD from the Albany Public Library. He isn't automatically impressed by positive notices in The New Yorker or other publications, nor should he be, but he saw no reason not to take a chance on Jim Mickle's apocalyptic vision, and now it's a film he wants to add to his personal collection.

Mickle envisions the fall of America within a generation of the outbreak of some kind of contagion -- he's vague about the cause but biological warfare seems likely -- that turns millions of people into fanged bloodsuckers who die in sunlight. Bad enough on its own terms, the contagion is abetted by a cult militia, the Brotherhood, who believe that the vampires are God's scourge to cleanse the earth. By providing the apparently mindless vampires with victims, the Brotherhood acquires a measure of control over them, and uses them as biological weapons, dropping them from helicopters into secure enclaves ("lockdowns") from small hamlets to Washington D.C. The federal government has collapsed, the politicians have fled or died, and the cities are hopelessly infested. That leaves survivors in small communities to fend for themselves in lockdowns or forge north toward "New Eden" in spite of rumors of cannibalism there. It's a world where lone-wolf hunters like "Mister" (co-writer Nick Damici) have become legends, but have also become a dying breed, and where extracted vampire fangs are trophies and a kind of currency. It's probably a matter of prestige rather than value; if you can show some fangs, particularly the long ones from "berserker" vampires, you can get a lot on the house.

Above, Mister (Nick Damici) plies his trade.

Below, the currency of his trade.

Mister is heading north with his assistant Martin (Connor Paolo), whom he rescued from an attack that left Martin's parents dead. Mister's a hard taskmaster, but you can understand his reasons, though people tend to question whether traveling is a better option than settling down, especially given the dangers in the wilderness where the Brotherhood holds sway. But Mister is a classic restless loner, Martin notwithstanding, and he seems to think that all the lockdowns are doomed, anyway. Inevitably, though, he runs afoul of the Brotherhood when he rescues a nun (Kelly McGillis) from rape and kills the son of local Brotherhood chieftain Jebedia (Michael Cerveris). The trio fall into a Jonestown trap, a feigned mass suicide, and are captured, the nun to become Jebedia's concubine, Martin to be raised by the Brotherhood, and Mister to be left tied up on the road at night as vampire chow. But Mister is not so easily disposed of, and Martin isn't so easily deterred from running away, and after some narrow escapes they leave the nun to her fate and hit the road again.

Mister hunts humans as well, especially rapists, but that puts him in trouble with the hooded Brotherhood

Along the way they hook up with an ex-Marine and pick up a pregnant hitchhiker (Danielle Harris)before taking revenge on Jebedia and reuniting with the somehow-escaped nun (it's really so unbelievable that she got away that we actually thought it might be a dream sequence) in another lockdown. A brief moment of reunions and revelry is ruined by a Brotherhood airdrop.  Leaving the lockdown folk to rebuild, our motley quintet ventures out once more, only to gradually discover that they're being stalked by a new kind of mutated vampire -- a "thinker" who proves all too familiar....

A fleeting moment of peace for Connor Paolo and "paranormal expert" Danielle Harris,

with Kelly McGillis barely visible at screen right.

Wendigo and I were strangely reminded of I Am Legend -- the Richard Matheson novel, not any of the movie versions -- by Stake Land's vampires and by its otherwise relatively sociable hero. The vamps here are folkloric revenants, little more than hungry corpses without any gifts for seduction, but still sufficiently humanoid that they're scary in a way the animalistic vampires from Priest were not. There are telling moments in Mickle's film where people recognize their vamp attackers as former neighbors and friends; some of the moments are sad, some sardonically funny. Mickle and Damici put their own stamp on the vamps by introducing different classifications and noting numerous mutations. They create a jargon of labels like "berserkers" (who have longer fangs and tougher breastplates, requiring a stake through the spine) and "scamps," young, confused vampires who haven't quite developed the killer instinct yet. They also try to naturalize the phenomena, by noting that vamps don't flourish in cold climates, while following Matheson in giving them some traditional yet unaccountable vulnerabilities. Following Priest, this is the second vampire film we've seen in a row that climaxes with the appearance of a "new" kind of intelligent vampire that comes closest to the traditional movie vampire. Wendigo suggests that this possible trend that portrays the traditional master vampire as the product of an evolutionary process is necessary to convince a skeptical audience that a lone humanoid vampire can once again be scary. The "thinker" or "human vampire" is a game-changer, Wendigo contends, changing the rules that the fantasy scenario has so carefully laid down. They're also an admission by writers and directors that the hordelike inhuman vampire really isn't as scary as they sometimes claim.

At the same time, Stake Land seemed to us at times like Zombieland played straight, with a violent eccentric training a neophyte and real risk facing any character we get to know.  Like in Zombieland, characters aren't encouraged to dwell on their pasts, and we never learn how Mister became a hunter or got his nickname. There's implicit resignation in this, an admission that there's no point dwelling on the past because it's gone and not coming back. That helps establish the plausibly postapocalyptic setting for a film that's more Mad Max than Road Warrior, though Wendigo was reminded even more of the Walking Dead comics and TV series. So does the enactment of a widely shared American nightmare of a militia cult taking over and imposing a reign of fanatic terror. The Brotherhood are such hateful villains that Wendigo and I were perplexed that the people in the lockdowns didn't join forces to destroy them utterly. But that's societal breakdown for you, I guess, and it may have something to do with Mister's lack of faith in any of the lockdowns. In any event, it's a story of "Red" America against itself, with a bias toward country music even among the good survivors, but we're not sure if there's a message to that.

Stake Land isn't above the occasional festive Romero homage.

Stake Land has a visceral quality that's probably only enhanced by Mickle's obviously small budget. Wendigo could tell whenever Mickle was cutting corners, and we could tell that he was doing so creatively, particularly when he stages the vampire airdrop in the obvious absence of an actual helicopter. You'll also notice that there aren't horde attacks or burning or exploding vampires -- we only see the remains when vamps are left out in the sun. The less obvious fakery, i.e. the less cheap CGI you use, the more convincing the fantasy actually becomes. Most of Mickle's effects budget went to makeup and practical gore effects, though Stake Land doesn't go overboard with the latter. The real keys to the movie's pretense of authenticity are Mickle's location work and art direction, which set the story in genuinely rundown and rugged settings and occasionally achieve paradoxically pastoral, even idyllic effects, and the committed acting of Damici and the rest of the unglamorous cast. Connor Paolo recovers quickly from his "Call me Ishmael" style opening to play a coming-of-age role in uncliched, unpredictable style. A completely deglamorized Kelly McGillis impresses in her small role as someone barely qualified to cope with disaster who struggles constantly to retain her moral sense. Not even Mister is a generic character, archetypal as sometimes seems. He's not a super slayer, despite his reputation, and he doesn't have all the answers or all the wisdom -- which means he's in as constant peril of making a fatal mistake as everyone else. Like the hero of The Road, it's possible to say that Mister's go-it-alone approach is the wrong answer for the time, and the ending suggests that Mister himself may have realized this. In fact, the film promises no safety, but insists on no doom, for any of the characters. It ends at a literal liminal point of transition, a border crossing that really stands for nothing but another milestone crossed. It's the happy ending of a day, or a stage, at most, and it's not particularly reassuring. Nor is it meant to be, since Stake Land is arguably a fall-of-America scenario first and foremost, with the vampires as a Macguffin -- though that doesn't dilute its power as a vampire film very much.

Mickle's movie will be joining Wendigo's permanent collection because it's a carefully crafted, convincing and character-driven fantasy rather than the all-too-common compilation of vampire cliches. In short, Stake Land creates the illusion of a real world gone terribly wrong. As such, Wendigo says it's the best vampire film he's seen since Let The Right One In. He recommends it strongly to any vampire fan, and especially to those who, unlike Wendigo himself, are sick and tired of the benign vampire fantasies of Twilight and the like. He hopes that Stake Land is a film all vampire fans can agree upon.

Wendigo Meets PRIEST (2011)

 Before anything else, we owe a shout-out to Coach Steve Niles and his vampires for laying the undead smack down on the zombies on Deadliest Warrior last week. They really showed Max Brooks and his "unstoppable virus" who the apex predators really are! But now for something completely different: Scott Stewart's extremely loose adaptation of Hyung Min-woo's graphic-novel series and the second teamup of the director and actor Paul Bettany. They first joined forces for 2010's Legion, a film my friend Wendigo liked more than most people did, and on the strength of that Wendigo was ready to give Priest a chance when it hit DVD. Cory Goodman (who has gone on to write the current release Apollo 18) took the Korean comics' core idea of holy warriors fighting supernatural menaces in the Old West and turned it into a multi-genre homage that eventually manages to take on a life of its own.

As an animated history explains, on this alternate reality "There has always been man, and there have always been vampires." The two species have been at war from the beginning, and despite the vampires' advantages in strength and speed humanity managed to develop technologies of mass destruction to destroy the vampires' hives. But the tide didn't turn until the emergence of the Priests: a co-ed order of vampire slayers who somehow acquired the strength and speed to beat the enemy in hand-to-hand combat. Wendigo and I spent the picture waiting for some big explanation of how this was possible; perhaps something to do with vampire blood or something similar. But the most we learned was that the Priests learned how to "focus." If you focus, for instance, you can leap through the air and use the stones tossed by another Priest (and that's probably important) as stepping stones for leaping higher still in order to engage the enemy. In other words, their powers make no sense at all -- but this is a fantasy world, so deal with it.

Anyway, at a certain point the Church declared victory and disbanded the Priests, who wander about their Blade-Runnerish "retro-future" cities without practical job skills or prospects for the future. That's the plight of our title Priest (Bettany) until he gets word that his brother's family has been attacked at a frontier settlement out west. Suspecting a vampire revival, he defies religious orders to venture out, only to find his brother (Stephen "True Blood" Moyer) on his deathbed and his niece kidnapped. Accompanied by a local lawman (Cam Gigandet) with a crush on the niece, the Priest embarks on a search for the girl, with the understanding that he'll kill her, despite the lawman's objections, if the vampires have turned her into a subhuman "familiar," or worse.

Our heroes find evidence of an impending vampire uprising, including a train-borne assault on the eastern cities, now in a state of perpetual night, in order to wipe out mankind. There's a human brain behind the plan: a fallen Priest (Karl Urban) who'd once been part of Bettany's team but had been captured by vampires and fed their queen's blood. That made him a unique "human vampire" who can daywalk and bare a couple of modest fangs with a smile. Aided by a Priestess (Maggie "Nikita" Q) who'd been sent to stop Bettany but has tender feelings toward him, the good guys have to stop that evil train from reaching the cities and save young Lucy, who's more closely related to Bettany than he first let on....

Wendigo had the liberty of knowing little about the Priest concept before watching the movie, so there were no expectations to be violated or disappointed. Legion created a certain expectation of action that the film fulfilled easily, and Wendigo expected Stewart and Bettany to offer a different take on vampire hunting, if not vampires themselves. Different it definitely was.

Wendigo had never seen vampires like the ones in this film. They're quite inhuman: sightless, fewer fingers, no apparent individual intelligence, and a variety of subspecies (warrior, guardian, queen, etc.) Stewart explains on the DVD that he wanted to make vampires scary again, but Wendigo thinks that the director went too far by reducing them to little more than animals. Intelligence is what makes vampires scary most of the time, but there was little frightening about Stewart's creatures. They're little better than fast zombies in that regard. They look interesting, but that's about it -- except for the human vampire "Black Hat."

The part was a bit of a step back for Urban, who relied on a lot of the bombast he brought to his Julius Caesar character on Xena:Warrior Princess. But his attitude keeps the character entertaining as a villain. Even with him, Wendigo was unclear about whether the plan to invade the cities was the ex-Priest's idea or something implanted by the batlike vampire queen. The former seems likely, since the film shows vampires faring quite poorly against just two Priests, plus a retro-future cowboy. On top of his master plan, Black Hat has an agenda of revenge against Bettany, who he still blames for letting him go in that past crisis and letting the vampires get him. He also has a more vague grievance against the Church that made him a Priest, as do the Bettany and Maggie Q characters. There's a Nam or Iraq vet subtext here in the film's portrayal of exploited and abandoned traumatized soldiers that might have been developed further -- how are Priests recruited and trained, and how old do you have to be or can you be to become one? -- but the film is what it is.

Scott Stewart clearly sees star quality in Paul Bettany, even as he arguably condemns the still-respected character actor to genre hell. Wendigo understands what Stewart sees in the actor; Bettany has an interesting look and he's a plausibly formidable physical presence. We agreed that, in this role, he looked like he'd stepped out of the pages of 80s-vintage Heavy Metal. Stewart admittedly doesn't give Bettany much emotional range, but that probably comes with the genre territory -- though Wendigo asks why, in this fantastical world, Bettany couldn't speak in his natural accented voice, while slumming Christopher Plummer could?

While Stewart may be unintentionally dragging Bettany down, he catches Maggie Q on the way up. Wendigo has seen some Nikita episodes and finds her an interesting actress with a different enough look to give her characters character. This picture gains some extra life when she arrives. Of the three heroes, Cam Gigandet as the lawman is no more than a bland audience-identification character, with no more purpose than to follow in the steps of Jeffrey Hunter.

Wendigo hadn't seen the reviews when Priest was released, but he is a Western fan, so he recognized early how the film was imitating the plot and character arcs of John Ford's The Searchers, with Bettany in the John Wayne role as the pursuer torn between rescuing and destroying his kin and Gigandet as the sidekick fighting for mercy. It's an interesting gambit but one the writer can't follow through on, since we can't have Lucy "living with a buck" the way Natalie Wood lives with the Indians in the great Western. Bettany can't face the dilemma of whether or not to kill his "tainted" kin, because were the girl tainted in this context she'd have to be killed. This deprives Bettany of levels of indignation and personal conflict, reducing him to his default mode of sullen grimness. Writer and director press on regardless, and a deleted closing scene is probably the most blatant homage possible, with everything but Bettany with hand on arm as the door closes on him.

We don't really have anything to say about Brad Dourif's character, but we include this picture because he's Brad F'n Dourif, and because we can.

But The Searchers is just one of the elements jumbled together in the genre cuisinart that is Priest. At its delirious best, Stewart's film is an insane mashup of post-apocalypse, dystopia, western, Spaghetti western, and vampire hunting. At any given moment we might recognize The Searchers, or Blade Runner, or Once Upon a Time in the West, or The Road Warrior -- or in my case, even The Good The Bad and The Weird. But Wendigo reminds me that I needn't make a long list of genre influences, because there's one word that sums it all up. Priest, he says, is steampunk -- a word that Scott "retro-future" Stewart can't bring himself to say. Now that he knows more about the Korean comics, Wendigo is more indignant about the Americans' disregard for the source material. But on its own terms, which are the ones we have to accept, he finds the Priest movie an effective, exciting action film, though not an improvement on Legion -- he just loves those archangels. But he won't recommend it to vampire buffs, since it won't really push their buttons much. For my part, I found this hard going for the first half as cliche followed cliche in tight formation. Once it hit its energetic stride in its last half-hour, though, it became quite fun to watch for its crazy synthesis of genres. It's nothing great, but it got better as it went along. Not all films do that, so let's give Priest some credit.

THE OMEGA MAN (1971)

Speak of the devil! Just the other day I mentioned that it's been decades since I last saw the second movie adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, and just yesterday while channel surfing I discovered that my local cable service had given me a new "free" on-demand movie channel. This one is shared by the Fox Movie Channel and a service called Vutopia, and the latter has quite a bit of interesting stuff, including Boris Sagal's Seventies spin on Matheson's "last man on earth" theme.

The Omega Man deviates the most out of the three versions of I Am Legend. While The Last Man on Earth and the I Am Legend movie stick with the idea of quasi-undead nocturnal hunters stalking our hero, Sagal's film turns the main menace into a religious cult: "The Family," led by a TV newscaster turned mad prophet (Anthony Zerbe). They conform to Matheson by being forced by their albinism to hide from the light during the day, but they are intelligent (albeit clinically delusional) creatures driven by an ideology that blames "the Punishment" on man's dependence on technology. Matthias, the leader, wants to take his remnant of mankind back to medieval simplicity, symbolized by the black robes and hoods the Family wear. Matthias doesn't know Robert Neville personally but may have heard of this military doctor as one of the experts struggling to find a cure for the plague. He hates Neville as a "slave of the wheel," a symbol of the damned past who must be purged before the world can begin anew in Matthias's twisted image. The cult angle is perhaps the most distinctive Seventies touch of the film, though in practice these hooded palefaces, handicapped by their aversion to useful technology like firearms, put one in mind of so many washouts from the Sith Academy. As a Seventies fan I find them sort of cool, but I admit that they come across a little campy as well.

And in this corner, Charlton Heston. As I wrote earlier, when I recently read I Am Legend I heard Heston's voice whenever Neville went on a rant. The actor's cynical yet righteously-indignant mode, perfected as Taylor in Planet of the Apes, is pitch perfect for the character Matheson wrote, and for the first half hour of The Omega Man Heston nails the role. He talks to himself constantly, except for carrying on a one-way conversation with a bust of Julius Caesar on the other side of his chessboard. He arranges a private screening of Woodstock in a desolate theater (three years after the plague the L.A. power grid is still good) and knows the hippie interviews by heart. He shows off a wardrobe worthy of an action figure (safari jacket, track suit, smoking jacket, army jumpsuit) and bares his manly chest with vainglorious frequency. When the Family manages to catapault a burning rock through his open window, he dispassionately extinguishes it and with equal dispassion opens up on his attackers with a machine gun. Unlike the abstemious Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth, Heston's Neville drinks frequently, and for those who keep score that includes a bottle of J&B. For Chuck, being the last man on earth is the ultimate bachelor pad adventure, and the sheer stupidity of the Family makes it hard for him to pity the world. He's like Col. Kurtz without an army carrying out his own directive: Exterminate All the Brutes.

The Omega Man brings Neville out of his shell sooner than any other version of the story. He gets captured by the Family and interviewed by Matthias before they plant a dunce cap on his head and condemn him to be executed in a sports arena. He gets rescued by some apparently healthy humans led by Lisa, a blaxploitation heroine (Rosalind Cash) and Dutch (Paul Koslo). They're in charge of a bunch of kids, including Lisa's brother who, like her, has a touch of the plague. When he takes a turn for the worse, Neville takes a chance that a vaccine he'd administered to himself could make his blood usable in a serum to cure the disease. As Richie reverts to his natural negritude and Neville scores with Lisa ("I'm not sure if I remember how this works," he says modestly), our hero decides to quit his fortress and trek with his new friends to make a new start somewhere. But Richie proves too good for his own good; if Neville's serum could cure him, couldn't it cure everyone in the Family? He goes to Matthias's lair, he and Lisa having lived with the Family briefly, to offer Neville's services, only to learn with extreme prejudice that Matthias isn't interested in going back to normal. His mistake sets up the final showdown between Neville and Matthias, when we learn that the spear is sometimes mightier than the gun....

Since it looks like some humans will survive, The Omega Man misses the point of Matheson's novel. While Heston's Neville may be an obsolete sort of individual, that's different from the horror of realizing that everything you are and know is not only obsolete but is already being replaced. And it's one thing for Neville to become a "legend" to the inheritors of the earth, the equivalent for them of vampires for humans, and a-damn-nother thing entirely to make him a Christ figure (his blood saves, you see), right down to striking the cruciform pose as he dies. Sagal's film isn't just the least faithful adaptation in tone of I Am Legend, but it's also more dated than The Last Man on Earth, which was made eight years earlier, and more dated than the Will Smith movie will ever get. The Omega Man is more embedded in its time than either other movie, but since that time is the Seventies, its datedness makes it an often-entertaining spectacle that the right audience is quite likely to enjoy immensely. Heston is a hoot, as he usually is in dystopian conditions, and at the same time he gives a respectable performance. Imagine William Shatner in the same role (which could be awful or awesome, depending on your tastes), and then imagine the next step on the evolutionary chart, and you have Charlton Heston. Rosalind Cash keeps pace with him with what looks like a precocious self-parody of a genre archetype that arguably hadn't even come into existence yet -- and she bares her chest nearly as often as Heston does, though not in as frontal a fashion. Also, you can not mow down or set afire too many chalky hooded dudes in a film like this, and in this regard The Omega Man does not neglect its responsibilities. This might not be the most faithful I Am Legend film, but it may be the most fun.

The trailer was uploaded to YouTube by frankyponty.

Wendigo Meets THE LAST MAN ON EARTH (1964)

Friends, I come before you to discuss the vampire; a minority element if ever there was one, and there was one....Really, now, search your soul, lovey -- is the vampire so bad? All he does is drink blood. Why, then, this unkind prejudice, this thoughtless bias? Why cannot the vampire live where he chooses? Why must he seek out hiding places where none can find him out? Why do you wish him destroyed? Ah, see, you have turned the poor, guileless innocent into a hunted animal. He has no means of support, no measures for proper education, he has not the voting franchise. No wonder he is compelled to seek out a predatory nocturnal existence.

Robert Neville grunted a surly grunt. Sure, sure, he thought, but would you let your sister marry one?

Richard Matheson's I Am Legend is a product of its time -- it was published in 1954 -- that has been perpetually reinterpreted ever since. It has been adapted for film three times -- add a fraction if you count the short film that Jean-Luc Godard claims to have based on the novel. It's a curious thing, though, that in our age of pop vampires the most recent movie version of the story, the one that uses the original title, took pains to make Robert Neville's enemies something other than vampires, or nothing we recognize readily as vampires. Did it lose something by doing without the creatures' aversion to garlic, crosses and mirrors? How important is vampirism to the story?

My friend Wendigo reminds me that Matheson's novel makes a lot of its hero's struggle to comprehend a mass outbreak of old-school vampirism. Neville teaches himself science in order to formulate a theory of vampirism's origins in bacteria, and part of its amusement comes from Neville's struggle to make it all make sense. When I read it, I thought it might be a transparent account of Matheson's own struggle to conceive a science-fiction vampire. To make the infected humans something other than traditional supernatural creatures sacrifices that psychological struggle to make sense (or science) out of the stuff of superstition. You sympathize with Neville's struggle in the book even while you question whether science can comprehend it all.

At the same time, Matheson's vampires, which are fairly well represented in Sidney Salkow's film (co-directed by Ubaldo Ragona), aren't parading around in opera capes and gesturing hypnotically at one another. Wendigo notes that George Romero has cited the novel as a major influence on Night of the Living Dead, and Salkow's film looks like it had to be a visual influence. These are pale, slow, staggering, somewhat spastic vampires, no match for a man one-on-one but strong in numbers. They may not be dead, but they're all messed up. We're as far away from Hammer as we are from Universal. Wendigo thinks this may be the first movie to imagine a world overrun (if not ruled) by vampires, though it lacks the exotic or erotic imagination of later variations on the theme. But if Matheson's or Salkow's vampires don't remind you of Lugosi or Lee, Wendigo says that their shabby appearance and uncouth manners fit many a folkloric profile of the vampire.

Walk slowly, and carry a big stick: Giacomo Rossi-Stuart as The Last Man on Earth's neighbor-turned nemesis Ben Cortman.

But the vampires themselves are less important to the overall mood of the story than Neville's attempt to understand or resist them. Wendigo sees a generation-gap subtext in it, with Neville as a flustered suburban parent who can't figure out those kids today, whose values are no longer his. The core story isn't so much about the extinction of mankind, as Salkow's title implies, but the obsolescence of a certain kind of man who may not like what's come to replace him but really doesn't have the power or the right to stop them. You can also read anxiety about Communist ascendancy into it; the era's paranoia was partly founded on the fear that Communism was going to win. As the excerpt above shows, you can also read some racial anxiety into it as well. I Am Legend was written at a time when many people saw the world changing out of control and couldn't see themselves in the future. The Last Man On Earth was filmed around that same time, but seems to miss the point a lot.

Above, Franca Bettoia as Ruth holds Vincent Price at bay. Below, the next generation of vampires makes its presence known.

According to Wendigo, Matheson was set to adapt his own novel under the impression that an A-list cast would work alongside Vincent Price in a big-budget movie, but bailed when he discovered the limitations of the production. Matheson shares screenplay credit under the pseudonym of Logan Swanson, but the finished product loses a lot of Neville's character. For starters, in one of those infuriatingly arbitrary decisions, Neville's name is changed to Robert Morgan. Second, this film makes him a scientist from the beginning struggling to find a cure for the pandemic, so we don't get those great (though maybe uncinematic) scenes when he teaches himself science. Third, Neville's alcoholism is underplayed. In the novel he frequently drinks himself into a stupor to drown out the yelling outside his door or forget his sorrows. In Last Man there's one scene when Morgan grabs a bottle of booze, but tosses it aside to go to sleep.

Maybe Matheson's co-writers thought a drunk who didn't know much about science was unworthy of Vincent Price. I have to say that when I read the novel, I heard Charlton Heston's voice in my head whenever Neville ranted or raved, even though it's been decades since I last saw The Omega Man. The Neville of the novel has that sardonic, cynical, self-pitying attitude that Heston could convey, but I don't think that was beyond Price's powers. Wendigo feels that Price was further undercut by the writers' heavy reliance on voiceover narration early in the film. That narration announces too early what the film will be about, and it denies Price the chance to reveal his character through his actions and his acting. He's better when he can show a range of emotion, laughing then crying while watching home movies, pathetically trying to reassure a dying dog, and desperately trying to keep the young woman he finds outside from running away from him. The main thing I miss from his performance is the rage that so often rises to the surface in the novel. Wendigo feels confident that Price could have pulled it off, but we'll never know.

No exploding vampires here: in this picture they stay where you staked them.

In an obvious sense, Last Man is more a vampire-hunter movie than a vampire film, though an especially bleak one compared to Hammer's Van Helsing vehicle Brides of Dracula. Vampire hunting for Neville/Morgan isn't a cool or glamorous calling, and there's little point to his stakings apart from payback. In that sense, The Last Man on Earth has had a greater influence on horror films outside the vampire sub-genre, particularly the "survival horror" category founded by Night of the Living Dead. Salkow's film has more historic than aesthetic significance. The script wastes too many of the novel's opportunities, from smothering the opening with voiceovers to dealing all too briefly with the hero's adoption of the dog. Like all the movie adaptations of I Am Legend, this film misses the point of Matheson's ending, the passing of a man who knows his time is past. Wendigo doesn't think it a waste of time, and he recommends it to anyone who wants to know what vampires looked like to most people in the distant past. He thinks Matheson fans should give it a look, if only because it'll give them a better appreciation of what Matheson accomplished and how movies have fallen short of it. Vincent Price's fans should enjoy this without reservation since it's the nearest thing to a one-man show he pulled off in a feature film. But the definitive film version of I Am Legend remains to be made.

"Can a zombie woman hunger for love?" That's the question asked by this trailer, uploaded to YouTube by fraserw2