The Last Man on Earth

My goodness, this movie holds up well. First watched it some 5 years ago, watched it again tonight, and I am beginning to realize how influential it is. As observed by many other posters, many films/directors are in debt to this movie. The list would begin but not end with "Night of the Living Dead", "Omega Man", "28 Days Later", and "Day of the Dead". There is also that very good Australian (?) movie, "This Silent Earth." That is to only mention the good movies. Countless crappy movies also owe their profits to this woefully unknown gem. Sure, as a Vincent Price fan I am biased. But the quality of this movie - from the script to the photography to Price's glorious intonations - is hard to deny.

When a plague devastates life on Earth, the population dies or becomes a sort of zombie living in the dark. Dr. Robert Morgan (Vincent Price) is the unique healthy survivor on the planet, having a routine life for his own survival: he kills the night creatures along the day and maintains the safety of his house, to be protected along the night. He misses his beloved wife and daughter, consumed by the outbreak, and he fights against his loneliness to maintain mentally sane. When Dr. Morgan finds the contaminated Ruth Collins (Franca Bettoia), he learns that there are other survivors. He uses his blood to heal Ruth and he becomes the last hope on Earth to help the other contaminated survivors. But the order of this new society is scary.

"The Last Man on Earth" is a frightening and dark view of the fate of mankind. In those years, the preoccupation with radiation and biological weapons due to the cold war leaded people to this type of fear and preoccupation; later with AIDS; and presently with the disease in chickens. Fortunately science has developed means to cure or at least avoid epidemic situation, but we do not know how far we might be from such sad end of mankind. Vincent Price has a great performance in this movie, particularly in the beginning of the insanity of his character showed when he sees a photo of his family. The screenplay is very well developed, but the violent conclusion is weird. I always thought that George A. Romero was the creator of the "zombies", because of his excellent 1968 "Night of Living Dead". But now I can see that the origin of these creatures was in "The Last Man on Earth".

When I was a teenager, the remake "The Omega Man" was a very successful film in the movie theaters. I had not had the chance to see the original movie, since "The Last Man on Earth" (and "The Omega Man") had not been released on VHS or DVD in Brazil. Fortunately a minor Brazilian distributor has just released "The Last Man on Earth" on DVD, giving me the chance to see this great unknown movie. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Mortos Que Matam" (Dead That Kill")

Obs: On 25 May 2008, I watched this great classic movie again.

On 15 March 2014, I saw this movie again.

I'm not sure why this film is as underrated as it is. This is an amazing, depressing and in many ways brilliant film based on the Richard Matheson classic novel "I Am Legend". Vincent Price effectively conveys the terror and despair of being the last living man on an Earth that is now overrun with vampires and/or zombies. The depiction of Price's day to day bleak existence is a moving and powerful thing to behold and the continual menace of the hordes of zombies is creepy in the same way as was later depicted in "Night of the Living Dead". In fact, as noted by others here, one can not watch the scenes where the zombies lay siege to Price's boarded up house and attack his car without recognizing how close these scenes would later be copied by George Romero in his classic zombie films. If you are a fan of horror film history or just looking for a classic and unique film with an interesting story, track down this lost gem.

I like this film, and definitely associate it with my childhood, via the inside cover of an old issue of Famous Monsters that pictured a vampire arm groping around the door for Vincent Price. I gazed at that photo as the magazine wore out, for years before I actually got to see the film.

Vincent Price is always good to see. But as he is not a terribly physical actor, he looks awkward doing some of the things he is called on to do here, like dragging a body to the edge of a pit and heaving it in, pounding a stake into a vampire heart, or hurling a mirror across the room in disgust and despair. Not standing about with cocktail in hand, dressed to the nines and oozing wicked sophistication, he looks about as out of place as Cary Grant would setting a trash can out at the curb.

I ask, in the title of this review, if we like this film "for all the wrong reasons" because, inescapably, I find it pitched at a sort of self-pity, tapping into the allure of images of yourself alone at the center of the human universe, of satisfied contemplation of the stupid folly of Man the Scientist, the Politician, the Warrior, that will bring the end of his own species. --In a word, it seems to inhabit a place that is the near-exclusive province of the truly isolated, disaffected and fantasy-prone adolescent.

Being aware of this demographic skew doesn't invalidate the real and strong emotional place the film creates and enables anybody else to inhabit. But I do wonder about the effusive, near-idolatrous over-analysis this film has been known to elicit. I think it would be a pity if, through the growing cult of this film, we come to be less moved by horror --the whole precept on which Matheson's novel and the film are based-- than seduced by the film's image of post-apocalyptic solitude, which can lapse into full-blown gloating misanthropy with just a slight nudge.

I find Last Man oppressively tragic and sobering and depressing-- and always, always utterly absorbing. Even tenth time watched, it feels like you are watching your own funeral, listening to nothing less than taps being sounded for your own species. This is, not to be too glib, the films greatest strength AND weakness.

"The Last Man on Earth" is an English language, Italian production of Richard Matheson's classic horror tale "I Am Legend", starring the great Vincent Price in the titular role.

This story was also done with Charlton Heston as "The Omega Man", and "I Am Legend" with Will Smith.

This is probably the best filmed version of this story I have seen. The black and white photography is fantastic, as is the direction, which really makes you believe you are witnessing a post-apocalyptic scenario. Above all, Vincent Price is surprisingly well cast as the titular last man, haggard, face drawn, less an action hero than a scientist trying to solve the problem of apocalypse.

The creatures in the movie are apparently vampires - they cannot go out in the day time, and they must be "staked" - yet they behave much more like the kind of zombies that George Romero would change the horror landscape with a few years later. I wonder if he was inspired by this film.