The Last Man on Earth

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.

Made four years before Night of the Living Dead, The Last Man on Earth tells a very similar story. Based on Richard Matheson's novel "I Am Legend", the film tells the tale of a terrible plague that has wiped out all of mankind and replaced them with vampire-zombie like creatures. Well, it's almost wiped mankind out - one man, Vincent Price, still remains. Now that he has inherited the Earth, the last surviving human has to hunt these creatures by day and then hole up in his house during the night. Vincent Price says most of dialogue in voice over, which gives this apocalyptic horror film a great element of pessimism, which is essential in order for the film to work. The way that Price reads his lines is done in such a way that it seems he has simply given up all hope, and this helps the tragic element of the movie, which is this film's main backbone. The dreary black and white cinematography helps this element of the film also, as it adds the degree of hopelessness and pessimism, which this story thrives on.

Quite how this film has reached the ripe old age of forty and still not garnered the praise and respect it deserves is beyond me. While Night of the Living Dead deserves the praise for 'really' creating the zombie movie that we all now know and love, this film got the theme first, and thus deserves it's place in the annals of film history. The story, even without the horror of the zombie creatures, still makes for fascinating food for thought. The idea of being left all alone on the Earth is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying, and by showing us the things that the protagonist has do every day to ward off the vampires (mirrors and garlic on the doors, hunting them by day), along with such quotes as "another day to live through" show the true horror of the idea behind the film. Of course, Vincent Price is one of the greatest actors of all time and his presence in the movie is easily one of the highlights. Price's great screen presence helps to offset the obvious low budget of the film and even during the slower moments, The Last Man on Earth still ensures that we are interested in what's going on, just by the fact that Price is there. On the whole, this is an extraordinarily brilliant film and one that deserves your viewing!

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.

Richard Matheson's seminal sci-fi horror novel, "I Am Legend", published in 1954, is first and foremost, a character study, and any film producer must come to terms with that, if there is to be a successful adaptation from print to screen. The novel was adapted to screen in 1964 as "The Last Man On Earth"; producer Sidney Salkow, hampered by a tiny budget, intuitively did the best he could and came close to pulling it off! What Salkow did was convey the novel's mood, tone, atmosphere and plot in primitive fashion, crudely capturing the gist of the novel - that of one man, Robert Neville's confrontation with a horrendous existential dilemma - to be, himself, that is; or not to be, a plague- induced vampiric shell. While "TLMOE" was not entirely successful in translation, especially in the ending - co-scripter Matheson ultimately distanced himself from the final product - it nevertheless, clearly outshines a later, technically superior 1971 remake, "The Omega Man" in the aforementioned aspects. "The Omega Man", taken on it's own, is an interesting, entertaining film; but when referenced against the novel, falls flat on it's face. (Matheson himself stated that that film and his novel are two completely different animals.) In contrast, "TLMOE" fares much better when referenced: it shows that Morgan's (Neville's) battle is more with reactions within himself than with the vampires as a physical threat per se, as it becomes obvious that the vampires are slow-moving, dull-minded individually, and disorganized as a group, each instinctively and savagely interested only in HIS blood. Besides the perpetually nightmarish nuisance of the vampires, who have a collectively demoralizing effect on him, Morgan (Neville) must fight against the horror generated by the desolation and doom of a post-apocalyptic world, against the loneliness of being the last human on earth and against the agony of tragically losing his wife and daughter to the plague. In the final analysis, "The Last Man On Earth" could be likened to a series of crude, but brilliant brush-strokes of feeling-tones. As such it fully deserves cult-classic status.

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.