A few months back author Richard Matheson passed away. I thought as a bit of a tribute I would watch one of the movie adaptations of my favourite Matheson novel, I Am Legend. There have been four adaptations: The Last Man on Earth (1964) starring Vincent Price, The Omega Man (1971) starring Charlton Heston, the 2007 Will Smith vehicle I Am Legend, and a 2007 direct-to-video release titled I am Omega apparently intended to capitalize on the Will Smith feature. I have already seen I Am Legend when it came out and didn’t absolutely hate it despite some poor CGI, a weak happily-ever-after ending, and Will Smith (I am not a fan). I feel like I should watch The Omega Man someday but it diverges so much from the source material that I’m a bit turned off. On the other hand, it is hard to go wrong with Vincent Price so I choose to sit down with The Last Man on Earth.

For the record, I’m not sure who the scantily clad young woman is, nor do I understand the significance of the long-haired, evil-eyed silhouette. Heck, I don’t even know whose house that is.

In some ways Vincent Price is miscast in this film. What I like most in a Vincent Price performance is his ability to remain dignified and almost regal while exuding a sinister hostility with little more than a raised eyebrow or significant pause. Even when he is not strictly speaking ‘the villain’, you still get the impression that he is plotting against his cast mates. In The Last Man on Earth, not only is he the tragic hero, but he spends a large amount of the film alone. Thus there is no one whom Price can play against with his oily charm. That being said, Price is a more rounded actor than he is sometimes given credit for and carries the film quite admirably. You feel the character’s loneliness and hopelessness. Price’s controlled and minimalistic movements give the impression of a man struggling to maintain his composure; fighting to keep the inner demons from breaking out just as he fights to keep the outer monsters from getting in.

The opening scenes of The Last Man on Earth are simple but effective in their portrayal of a desolate world. Eerily still buildings (although I’m sure I saw smoke rising from one chimney) and deserted streets strewn with forsaken cars immediately convey the impression of abandonment. When the images begin to include bodies lying in the streets, a sinister aspect is added to the loneliness.

Many of the corpses in these opening shots seemed like they were the same guy. Positioned so the face is not visible, the repeating corpse always had dark slacks and a tan jacket with a large tear in the back.

Our first glimpse of Vincent Price as Dr. Robert Morgan is of him lying, apparently within arms’ reach, on the other side of a fairly large opening in a boarded-up window. Given what we will shortly learn of his situation, this seems both unwise and unlikely. Price is living in a world overrun by vampires and, while he is fairly safe during the day, must barricade himself in his home every night to protect himself from the hordes. In Matheson’s novel, you get a real sense of claustrophobia and the feeling that the slightest crack in our hero’s defenses will be his downfall. The movie downplays the immediate danger aspect, possibly for budgetary reasons. This is done by making the vampires more like shambling, weak zombies that are confounded by things as simple as doors. That said many of the vampire aspects are still retained including fear of sunlight, mirrors, and garlic.

If you look closely, you can see the clapper on the alarm clock moving before you hear the bell and before Price reacts.

To drive home Dr. Morgan’s circumstances, the film’s title is displayed immediately after his introduction. The Last Man on Earth is actually not a bad retitling. It gets the idea across quickly and simply to the viewing audience in a way that I Am Legend cannot. It is also rather unsettling after the bleak opening shots.

In voiceover (being alone Price relies on voiceover and pantomime to convey much of the plot and his characters emotion), Dr. Morgan informs us that he has been alone for 3 years. Every day consists of a repetitive roster of chores designed to keep him alive through the night to come. This includes replacing broken mirrors and crosses hung around the house, ensuring his generator is still operational, and generally keeping his fortress/home in shape. You get the feeling this has all become fairly meaningless to Morgan and that he continues more out of a spurious sense of routine than any real desire to remain alive. The closest he comes to a purpose in his life is his daily hunt to destroy sleeping vampires. Towards this purpose, Morgan has a lathe on which he creates a stockpile of wooden stakes.

After checking on the state of his home, Morgan goes out for some grocery shopping and vampire hunting. On the way he stops to load the bodies of two vampires left on his lawn into the back of his Chevy sedan. Dr. Morgan, still in voiceover, explains that the vampires turn on each other when they cannot get to him. For whatever reason, he doesn’t close the hatch on the back of his car and drives around with the corpses’ feet hanging out the back. Perhaps this explains why they have swapped positions by the time he arrives at ‘the pit’.

Actually the corpses are quite good at playing dead and allow Price to toss them around a bit as he scoops them up and throws them into the back of the car.

The pit is a cavernous hole in the ground in which we learn he, and the military before him, dispose of infected vampire corpses. The pit is constantly smouldering although what, short of a tire fire, could constantly be burning down there, I can’t imagine. Morgan pours some gasoline down the edge in what you would think is a completely ineffective gesture but, when he tosses a burning torch down after the gasoline, there is a satisfactory explosion and gout of flame.

The next stop is the abandoned grocery store for some supplies. Despite the implication that he must have been coming here for the last three years, it is necessary for Morgan to push his way through a large knot of shopping carts. Inside, he has been apparently keeping a huge refrigeration unit going all this time to store sides of beef and cloves of garlic. Morgan stocks up on garlic, commenting on how they are still fresh. Unless he is growing his own garlic somewhere, I don’t see how three year old garlic can possibly be fresh. Then he moves on to the mirror store to stock up on mirrors. Vampires apparently do have a reflection but cannot stand to gaze upon it so the mirrors help keep them at bay.

All Mirrors, All the Time! If vampires hate mirrors so much, I’m surprised they haven’t destroyed this entire store by now.

Finally Morgan moves on to his vampire hunt. This involves scouring abandoned buildings and disturbing vampires while they ‘sleep’ (and this is exactly what they appear to be doing). In a montage, we see Morgan hammering stakes into what seem more like vagrants than vampires before delivering their bodies to the pit.

Price doesn’t seem to be really hitting anything in these scenes. There is no sense of the stake connecting with anything. Couldn’t they have had a side of beef from the refrigeration unit just off camera for Price to drive the stake into?

Later that night, we get our first glimpse of the vampires in action as they lay siege on Morgan’s home. As I already alluded to, the vampires are lacking in fine motor skills and don’t do much more than beat ineffectively on the house with sticks and rocks. All with the exception of one vampire who also torments Morgan by calling to him by name.

“Morgan, come out! Come out!”

In flashbacks and home movies watched by Morgan, we soon come to learn that his tormentor vampire is Ben Cortman, a former neighbour, co-worker, and friend. Ben and Morgan had been co-workers at the Mercer Institute of Medical Research working to find a cure for the strange plague sweeping the world and believed to be carried on the wind.

Morgan’s wife is maybe just a little too happy to see ‘Uncle’ Ben.

As Morgan and Ben struggled to stop the spread of the disease, rumours began about people coming back from the dead and the government instituted a policy of burning all victims of the plague in large pits. When Morgan’s own daughter succumbed to the illness, he unsuccessfully attempted to prevent her body from being tossed in the local pit. When his wife died the very next day, Morgan swore he would not allow her to end up in the pit. He instead buried her in secret only to have her show up at the door that evening.

“Let me in. Let me in.”

In the present, Ben has directed the other vampires to wreck the Chevy while Morgan has been reminiscing. This doesn’t faze Morgan, who simply goes to a dealership the next day and picks out a new car. Although he feels a little tempted to pick something sporty, he remains practical and chooses another sedan.

Arriving at home with his new acquisition, Morgan spots a stray dog. Desperate for any companionship, he chases after the dog but soon loses it. As he scours the city in search of it, he comes across several vampires that have been staked with iron spears instead of the wooden stakes he uses. The implications are obvious; somebody else is slaying vampires and therefore he is not alone.

The dog later returns to the house and Morgan brings it in to clean it up. While talking to it and petting it, he notices…something; I couldn’t tell what it was. But it makes Morgan suspicious so he does a blood test on the dog only to discover that it is infected with the ‘vampire germ’. The next scene shows Morgan burying the dog with a wooden stake driven into it.

I don’t know what to assume would happen to the dog once it succumbed to the illness. It is not like we see any signs of other vampire animals. I’m also not sure why he didn’t throw it in the pit.

As Morgan finishes burying the dog, he spots a woman casually strolling towards him. She supposedly doesn’t see him and bolts when she finally notices him staring incredulously at her. Morgan gives chase and convinces her to come back to his house with him. At the house, we learn that the woman’s name is Ruth Collins. She acts very suspicious whenever Morgan isn’t looking; checking herself in a mirror, snooping around, and keeping a small packet concealed in her skirt. She also takes it upon herself to put on what must be his wife’s sweater that she finds in a drawer.

Whether intentional or not, Ruth looks quite a bit like Morgan’s deceased wife.

For someone craving human contact, Morgan is not a particularly good host. He shoves garlic in Ruth’s face and accuses her of being a vampire. In the novel, the hero himself partially explains this behaviour as being due to his failing social graces after three years of isolation. When Ruth makes as if to leave, Morgan somewhat oddly says, “You can’t go out there. At least let me give you a blood test.” Ruth refuses the blood test but agrees to stay.

At this point, things start to happen pretty fast and get a little confusing. Morgan shares with Ruth his theory on his own immunity to the vampire germ. He was once bitten by a bat while working in Panama and he believes the bat had the vampire germ and thus passed a weakened version on to Morgan which immunized him. Shortly after this discussion, Morgan catches Ruth trying to give herself an injection from her small packet. She confesses to him that she was ‘one of them’ and “without that injection I’ll be one again.” This would imply she was a vampire once which means she must have died but that is obviously not what is meant since Ruth later says that she and her group are alive. Unbeknownst to Morgan, a group of humans has found a way to keep at bay the sickness that results in death followed by vampirism. According to Ruth the injection is “defebrinated blood plus vaccine”. The blood is to feed the germ while the vaccine prevents it from multiplying. How Morgan, who was one of the last scientists working on a cure, didn’t know about this is a bit puzzling. It also negates the title of the movie since Morgan is not the last man on earth.

Ruth’s infant society sees Morgan as a monster, a creature out of legend (hence the title of the novel) that hunts and destroys them. Ruth tells Morgan that some of his vampire hunts have resulted in him killing some of her group, living people that Morgan mistook for vampires. This comes as a horrible shock to Morgan and makes their fear of him a little more understandable. Either way, Ruth’s group plans to destroy Morgan.

“Your new society sounds charming.” “The beginning of any society is never charming or gentle.”

Ruth is supposed to hold Morgan at the house until members of her group can come to kill him (a plan that doesn’t make much sense). Having got to know him, however, she has a change of heart and besides, without her injection, she quickly grows weak and blacks out. Not sure what to do with her, Morgan gets the idea to give her a blood transfusion of his blood (using a neat hand-pumped device). As Morgan explains, the antibodies in his blood cures her of the vampire germ. It strikes me as odd that, as a scientist looking for a cure and having a theory for his own immunity, Morgan didn’t try this at some point in the past. I also question the validity of such a treatment. Perhaps his blood could act as a vaccination, but a cure?

Morgan is practically giddy with the thought that they can cure the others as well and “never be alone again”. However, when the angry mob from Ruth’s group arrives, they are not in a mood to listen. They kill all the vampires hanging around Morgan’s house (including Ben who’s death is not as poignant as in the book but still rather ironically sad) and chase Morgan through town despite Ruth pleading with them to stop.

The Last Man on Earth stays reasonably close to the original story and certainly is more true to it than any of the other adaptations. This isn’t surprising as Matheson himself worked on the screenplay (although he apparently did not want his name associated with the final film). What this means is that the film, like the novel, paints a bleak picture and maintains that bleakness right to the last scene. It is a bit of a hard film to watch. When I discuss films, even (or especially) those I love, I enjoy mocking them a bit and pointing out some of their flaws. Although I still did some of that with The Last Man on Earth it was more difficult to get into it. This isn’t a movie to ridicule over a couple of beers with the guys. It is, however, despite whatever misgivings Matheson had, a decent adaptation that honours its source material.