The Last Man on Earth

(1964) *****

My last movie! I had to check this one out after JPX's glowing review of it last year. After not much consideration I decided it deserved the same five-star rating he gave it. This one is a winner. It's based on Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend, which was further cinematized in 1971 as The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston. And as you probably know, two weeks from today it's going to be released as yet another movie, finally reverting to the title I Am Legend and starring Will Smith. HandsomeStan worked on it, and you can read about that adventure in his sneak review preview review.

There's going to be a spoily section at the end of this review, but I'll give you a head's up.

Vincent Price plays Dr. Robert Morgan, who is indeed the last man on Earth, as everyone else has been taken by a plague that turns them into vampire zombies. Immune to the airborne plague, he holes up in his house every night and cranks jazz music to drown out the noisy vampires moaning outside. One of them is an old friend of his, who calls him by name: "Morrrgan! Come out, Morgan!" During the day he drives into town to stock up on supplies and scout out the hiding places of the sleeping zombies, pounding stakes into them and then grimly marking off the tiny area of the map he's managed to cover so far. At the film's beginning he's been doing this for three years and the strain of it is showing; he plods around his various tasks disgusted at his lot, yet still clinging to the survival instinct.


Reading JPX's review last year, which featured the photo above, I made the incorrect assumption that the building in the background was where Vince was holed up. But he's acutally living in his house, the same one he lived in when everything was normal. For this to work, the zombies are of a particularly weak variety. They can talk, but they can't push through the boards on the windows or remember how to use a doorknob. At one point our hero is able to fight his way from his car to his house without suffering a single bite.

This reduced threat level would seem to be a detraction, and for that reason I considered knocking off a half star for about ten seconds. But this movie isn't about the real physical dynamics that characterize Night of the Living Dead, it's about the dread emotional weight of being a sole survivor. This is from the 60's when they still resembled the 50's, and the horror is having one's home -- complete with door knocker and picket fence -- turned into a fortress against cold, clawing death in the night.

In a long flashback we see the American Dream crumbling to nothing. As Morgan works to find a cure, fewer and fewer of his coworkers coming in, his daughter succumbs to the plague and he moves too late to recover her body. The army is dumping truckloads of the dead into a flaming pit, and a tired sergeant tells Price "a lot of daughters are in there, including mine."

At this point in the history the dead are simply being burned to avoid the spread of the plague, but there are rumors of the horrifying second stage. Morgan's coworker, who will later be lurching around in his yard calling his name, has holed up in his house and hung garlic on the door. The "vampire" part of the plague is clever: postmortem symptoms are vampire-like but not supernatural: the infected are violently allergic to garlic, sunlight and the sight of their own image. Robbed of the nourishment from Morgan's blood, the vamps feed on the weakest of their own, so Morgan must clear a few corpses out of his yard every morning.

And for the spoiler-wary, here is where I leave you, fellow 'thonners. The information beneath the next picture reveals further plot that you may want to save for later. But I highly recommend this journey into a bleak, ruined version of Home Sweet Home. One of the dourest, most potent flicks I've seen from this era of horror.



SPOILERS A-COMIN'!

SPOILY SPOILERS!

SPOILY McGEE!

The kicker to this story, and the meaning of the novel's title, is that the good Doctor himself has become the monster of this world. It turns out that among the mindless zombie vamps there's a society of infected humans who haven't died, and who keep their symptoms at bay using a serum they've developed. They plan to rebuild civilization, but first intend to corner and do away with this legendary superman who has the ability to walk around in the daytime, sometimes killing living humans while he's staking the vampiric dead.

A great idea, although it strikes me as bizarre that such a societal reversal would take place in only three years. Moreover, Morgan's staking of actual living humans could have been prevented if they'd, I don't know...left a note? "Don't kill me, please, I'm alive."

Again, I found these to be minor plot hiccups completely redeemed by the wonderful pathos of the film's climactic ending. Morgan actually succeeds in curing Ruth Collins, one of the living infected, but that flash of hope is immediately snuffed when her fellow infected show up to kill him. Hounding him to a nearby church, he stands at the altar surrounded by the brave vanguard of this new night society, all dressed in black like some McCarthy-era nightmare cabal. Hit with a spear, he watches the pure blood of the last man on Earth flow from him, and his alienation and resentment unleash themselves. "You're all mutants! You're freaks!" he yells, falling to the floor. But then, as the Ruth cradles his head, his rage is swept away by the tragic sadness of his lonely years, and he laments "they were afraid of me."

I believe that's the real dark heart of this story, not just that the new mutants are the normals, but that our hero's worst enemy, his own isolation, turns out to be a direct result of his survival rituals. The movie ends on a beautiful creepy note, as Ruth silences a small, black-clad child spooked by all the activity. "There there, everything is all right now."

As the last words of this year's Horrorthon, I loved that moment. It's okay now, folks. Horrorthon's over, and everything is going to be fine now. That is, as long as you're a mutant vampire freak in a black turtleneck. The normals? Well, they've got another thing coming.