[THE LAST MAN ON EARTH screens Saturday February 16th at 5:15 pm and Sunday February 17th at 8:45 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]
Review by Bob Ignizio
After an unstoppable plague turns
everyone else into vampires, Robert Morgan (Vincent Price) finds
himself THE LAST MAN ON EARTH.
Adapted from Richard Matheson's novel 'I Am Legend' with the
(uncredited) participation of the author himself, this film version
follows the source material pretty closely, and yet the author still
found himself dissatisfied with the results enough to ask that he be
credited under a pseudonym.
If
only Matheson had been able to see ahead to future film adaptations
(1971's THE OMEGA MAN
and 2007's I AM LEGEND)
he might have been more forgiving. While THE LAST MAN ON
EARTH is by no means a perfect
film, it is a pretty solid 'B' sci-fi/horror flick. Price, who has a
not undeserved reputation for hammy performances, here carries almost
the entire film on his shoulders with not a whiff of pork to be
sniffed. Scenes of the vampires assaulting his home at night bear
more than a passing resemblance to the zombie assault on the
farmhouse in George A. Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
a few years later, and the film's ironic downbeat ending is very much
ahead of its time.
