Really Good Movies! The one with the vampire apocalypse

 

 

Title: The Last Man On Earth

What Year?: 1964

Classification: Prototype/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Awesome!!! (3/3)

 

As I write this, I am just getting around to looking at further use for my most forcefully retired feature, The Revenant Review. The main thing this led me to was looking at alternatives to the quite labor-intensive review format I use on my blog. That, in turn, has led me to reconsider some movies I had passed over for that feature. In many of these cases, I have decided to cover them another way. For a few, on the other hand, I have decided that a full review was indeed in order. The first of these was Day of the Dead, which I covered in the last installment of this still new feature. This time, I’m back with the other, a film that is highly influential and widely available, yet still easily underestimated in both importance and quality. I present The Last Man On Earth, the archetype of the zombie apocalypse, and that’s just the beginning of its impact.

Our story begins with an introduction to Robert Morgan, who narrates his own situation with brief, almost emotionless comments as he patrols a city seemingly devoid of human life. He disposes of many of the bodies of the dead, which he remarks are “the weak ones”, but sometimes, he runs them through with wooden stakes first. He hurries to get home by dark, when we finally see what he is afraid of: A host of blood-sucking undead, brought to life by the same plague that has wiped out civilization, led by his one-time friend and coworker Ben Cortman. The story is filled out by a succession of flashbacks to the onslaught of the plague, in which our protagonist lost his daughter and his wife, and had to redeanimate the latter. In the present, Morgan is the only uninfected survivor, still looking for a cure to the plague but mostly destroying the undead and the living infected. Things change when he discovers someone else is killing the undead. Then he finds a mysterious survivor who soon reveals the truth: Some of the infected have learned to reverse the effects of the plague- and they consider Morgan their enemy!

The Last Man On Earth was a 1964 post-apocalyptic film starring Vincent Price (see… Dead Heat?), based on the horror/ science fiction novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (see Duel… and Jaws 3???). The film was made by AIP, from a script written by Matheson and previously offered to Hammer Films. Matheson reportedly declined credit for the script after significant revisions. The movie was filmed in Italy, with Sydney Salkow and Ubaldo Ragona sharing directorial credit. The film received a US theatrical release in early 1964; it was not considered commercially successful. It gained influence over time, notably being acknowledged as a major influence on Night of the Living Dead (see the remake review). Matheson’s novel was adapted far more loosely as The Omega Man in 1971 and I Am Legend in 2007. The film is in the public domain.

For my experiences, this is another case where I read the novel before I saw any of the movies. I was impressed enough to reference the book in my own work, but I’ve had a lot of trouble when I’ve tried to come back to it. The problem I found from the beginning was that Matheson tried much too hard to remove the supernatural from his tale. It was all well and good to skewer the Christian pretexts of Victorian literature and later Hollywood (possibly the most surreal passage of the very odd book is a musing on a Muslim vampire!), but the lengthy (pseudo) scientific “explanations” aged no better than the source material he was making fun of. On still further consideration, the best thing Hollywood could have done with it was what we already got from Romero: Let the rationalizations go, whether scientific or religious, and focus on the sheer terror and despair of civilizational collapse and the further fear of the unknown and unknowable.

With that all said, the present film is a singularly impressive effort, capturing and at times arguably amplifying the isolation and paranoia of the novel. As often happens, many of the strongest moments come early on as we see the protagonist’s clearly well-practiced routines. The story gets a boost from the flashbacks of the middle act, as we see the military destroying the infected. We get a further sense of the protagonist’s transformation, as his struggle to give his loved ones a dignified burial ends in his reanimated wife trying to do him in. It’s enhanced throughout by the singular undead. These are truly the missing link between the cinematic vampire and the zombie. They’re pale, vaguely grungy, and decidedly slow-moving. They almost always appear emotionless, with no sign of pleasure at making a kill. Most intriguingly, there’s some fairly detailed exploration of their intelligence, albeit mostly from the protagonist’s conjectures. They can talk and use tools, though Morgan maintains that he would be dead if they were his equals. He further compares them to starving and diseased animals, implying that they may have deteriorated mentally. Certain weaknesses, especially an aversion to mirrors, are taken to be psychological “blocks” possibly shaped by pre-existing superstitions about vampires. One thing not directly commented on is that the gang gathered at his door don’t seem to number more than 10 or 20, implying either that they are solitary or that their numbers are thinned indeed.

The quite typical “con” here is that things get dodgier in the final act. The meeting of Morgan and a survivor is played up as drama, when in reality, it’s a certainly intriguing but not “game-changing” development. After all, we already know that there are several varieties of living and undead in play, so one more doesn’t necessarily reframe Morgan’s predicament. Things do get interesting as they interact, with Morgan still suspicious. At the peak of his psychotic detachment, he speaks freely of his intent to kill his nemesis Cortman. The best moment comes when he is confronted for killing the living infected along with the undead, which he really knew all along despite his protests. My favorite part is when she remarks that he knows even less than she already did. It’s some truly great moments, despite significant flaws. What follows, however, is merely routine, made all the more problematic by Morgan’s unrepentance as he freely decimates those justifiably sent to kill him.

And since these reviews have already been going long, what I have found most intriguing is that it all feels like it “should” have been made far earlier than it was, what I have called the Anachronistic Outlier. Of course, I have said this often enough to start doubting my own judgment on such things. Yet, this is truly one of the clearest, most definitive and most egregious examples, complete with black-and-white cinematography at a time when even junk like Hercules Against The Moon Men was being shot in color. I can’t be entirely alone in this, because I repeatedly had to recheck the date of release due to sources that incorrectly list it as 1960, which is still later than it really looks. To me, it is the sense of being unmoored in time that has come to define the experience of the film. It looks like it could have been shot in the 1950s or even earlier, but the sophistication of its themes and presentation still compare favorably to much later films.

That leaves the “one scene”, and what stood out for my purposes is the return of Mrs. Morgan. After burying his wife rather than burning her, our protagonist is back at home, more surreally calm than usual as he pours himself a drink; a case could be made that he knows perfectly well what’s coming. (Ah, yes… why couldn’t they just call him Neville???) He looks merely puzzled at a very faint voice repeating, “Let me in.” He calls out as he approaches the door, seemingly unable to recognize the voice or at least unsure. By the time he reaches the door, the voice has stopped. Instead, the door knob is wiggling, shown with a closeup and very audible sound effects. Finally, he opens the door, which is evidently locked from inside but not bolted. Of course, the revenant is right there, looking disheveled and simply spaced out. Only then does she say as she advances, “Robert.” The funny thing is, for once, I’m not cutting things off, as this is truly as much as we see of the incident. It ends simply with Robert staring back, and in my “head canon”, I picture him debating whether to fight back or join the undead voluntarily. The lesson remains, there are times when we’ve already seen enough.

In closing, what I come back to is a question I already ranted on with my review (and follow-up video) of The Thing: What really constitutes a movie that is “underrated”, and how far does it have to go to cross over into an accepted “classic”? This is a film that, on top of everything else, falls on the borderline. It’s clear that it was successful enough in its own time to have an immediate impact on genre films. In the long term, it has been so widely proliferated that a good number of people who would claim familiarity with it simply because it’s in a public-domain boxed set they may or may not have watched. In a sense, it has gone through the “classic” treatment and out the other end, in the process creating quite a few things that might now be casually dismissed as cliches. That, ultimately, is why I rate it as highly as I have, in some ways higher than I now would the novel. (I will give one more shout-out for the graphic novel treatment by Steve Niles and Elman Brown, which is truly everything you could hope for.) For everything that is dated and overly familiar, there are still things that can take you off-guard, whether you’re watching it the first time or the twentieth. That is what makes a movie a classic and even more, and that’s enough for me to call it a day.