The Legend himself. |
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Richard Matheson is probably not a household name to you, but it should be. His career spanned the better part of five decades, and his contributions to the sci-fi and horror genres cannot be measured without charts and graphs. Not only was he a screenwriter for Roger Corman back in the day (THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM and THE RAVEN, for example), but he wrote no less than 11 Twilight Zone episodes, including the classic Terror at 20,000 Feet, which was later redone in the superb TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE, which itself has a heaping helping of Matheson's writing sprinkled throughout. Other works of his can be seen in cinematic adaptations such as DUEL, THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE, TRILOGY OF TERROR, THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, SOMEWHERE IN TIME and STIR OF ECHOES (one of my particular favorites). Not too shabby, I would say. Well, there is also WHAT DREAMS MAY COME, but they can't all be winners.
But as impressive as that resume may be, I will refrain myself from geeking out on them and keep to the subject matter I wish to set forth in this column: namely, the trio of films based on Matheson's seminal 1954 novel I Am Legend. In the book, Robert Neville is an everyman plant worker faced with a decidedly not-everyman problem: basically that of the depopulation of the world from humans. He is not the only person left, just the last person still human. What remains are two new types of species forged from the fire of humanity: both vampires, just some still alive and those that are truly undead. Left purposefully vague, as Neville does not begin the novel as much of an intellectual, there are oblique references to both bombing from a recent war and dust storms that are plaguing the planet.
The novel begins five months into Neville's new type of existence, and he is still experiencing growing pains. He spends his daylight hours stalking the city, destroying vampires as they lay listless in their morning comas. But he still yearns for the companionship and love of his deceased wife and daughter, while still attempting to come to terms with the undeniable existence of vampires. Which he is forced to believe as they stalk around his front door every night, and one particularly vocal chap, his former-friend Ben Cortman, calls to him to come out. The women vampires are less vocal, and instead attempt to entice him out by displaying their, um, wares to him. And every morning after he doesn't come out to play, Neville must dispose of the cannibalized bodies of the weaker vampires, such is the need of the stronger to feed.
Unaccepting of a supernatural explanation for the vampire holocaust, Neville finds new purpose in his life in scouring the city's library for books on physiology and bacteriology, and then experimenting on the vampires before he kills them. It is in this way that he formulates the theory that the dust storms, caused by the inferred nuclear bombing that took place during the inferred WWIII, kicked up a germ from some hidden place, the ancestral corpse of the Alpha-infected, the creature came to be known as Dracula, and spread it all throughout the world. It is this microscopic bug that bores through the skin and sets up shop. It multiplies in the system and craves blood to the extent that after the host dies, the germ has invaded them to the point where it can essentially run them on autopilot, hence the corpses returning to "life". It is also this passage of time, and the incumbent research and termination, that further cements Neville's growing dementia, and also sets the stage for the moral ambiguity that makes the book so chilling.
Both of those things are also what makes each of the three movies ultimate failures in capturing the spirit of the book. Don't get me wrong, they all have their merits, and two of them work just fine the way they are, for me. It is only when compare to the source novel that they fail.
The first entry is 1964's THE LAST MAN ON EARTH. In it, Vincent Price is cast as a slightly re-imagined research 
Who ordered the ham and stake? *slaps knee* |
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chemist named Robert Morgan. Other than that and the decision to begin the story after Morgan has already been living the way he has for three years (where the book ends) the film keeps pretty faithful to the novel. We see Morgan as he is turning stakes on his lathe and stringing garlic for wreaths to hang from his door (though he believes in the repelling power of mirrors, which Neville in the book discounts as a waste of time almost immediately). Price is a treat to watch, as always, but even more so here because when most people think of his name, they think of some grandiose and mugging villain on the order of THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES, not the sober and anguished man he portrays here.
Another interesting thing about the film is its obvious influence on George Romero. The scenes featuring the vampires haunting Morgan's door, and that of Cortman (who gets to retain his name, apparently) calling him out, are not only creepy and effective, with the high contrast and dark shadows, but also evokes more than a passing thought of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Romero, like his friend and sometimes collaborator Stephen King, has never been shy about the affect Matheson's writing has had on him, but one could cut a scene of the vampires from LAST MAN and splice it into a scene of NIGHT and it would be damn difficult to tell which was which.
Some people have accused LAST MAN of being a bit ponderous in its first half, sort of plodding along, but I disagree. I feel that it effectively shows Morgan's isolation and loneliness, and his joy at finding an actual, living dog, and his subsequent terror as it runs away from him are both palpable and poignant. It is in the second half, when the woman Ruth makes her entrance into the story, that I find the movie falters the most. But only in terms of how it applies to the source material. There is still the same question of whether she is actually infected or not, but how she acts, and how Morgan in turn reacts to her, are entirely different. And as an extension of such, takes the finale further and further away from what it should have been. The end is sort of a bummer, but nowhere near packs the psychological punch of the book. It ends up being a serviceable summation of the story, but even those who have not read the book feel a weensy bit let down by it. In fact, Matheson actually had a hand in writing the script, but was upset about the direction in ended up taking and asked for his name to be taken off the credits (he was eventually credited as Logan Swanson, a sobriquet you can see pop up from time to time on his resume).
About a decade later saw the release of the second attempt at the story, the Charlton Heston-starred THE OMEGA MAN (1971). And oh boy, does it suffer from its 70's timeframe. This time Neville gets to keep his original name, but not only does it also begin three years into the story, but Neville gets promoted to medical doctor, an army doctor, to be more specific. I assume that putting him in the medical profession is a means of explanation to his knowledge of the bacteria, just as in LAST MAN, and again it totally disregards the fact that the horrors of the new world, and Neville's understanding of his lack of a place in it, is what spurred him on to become an intellectual, to exercise his mind, the only thing he had left to prove he was still a human being, as well as a means of explaining to himself what was going on out there.
But I digress.
So, in OMEGA, we have Dr. Chuck wheeling around the empty town in a little red convertible, blasting at anything that movies with a machine gun. He ends up getting into a bit of a fender bender with a stationary vehicle, and in his attempt to procure a new vehicle ends up getting home after dark, setting up his first on-screen encounter with his nemeses. Who in this case happen to be incredibly ridiculous pasty-face ghouls wearing clichéd monk's robes. It seems that in this version, germ-warfare was used during WWIII, and when the bacteria 
Who ordered the ham and cheese? *slaps other knee* |
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gets out of control, all of the earth's inhabitants are reduced to creepy albino Luddites with delusions of grandeur. Well, except for Chuck. Who is the last man on earth. Except for the other dudes. But more on that later. I'm not done bashing the albinos yet.
Are they vampires? No. Joyce Hooper Corrington, co-scripter of the film (she wrote it along with her husband, now deceased) explains in a mini-doc on the disc (where she looks and sounds a lot like Brundlefly) that writing about vampires didn't "feel right", and since she has a degree in Chemistry, she decided to make the film about germ-warfare instead. So what we end up with is surprisingly erudite creatures, waxing philosophical about the true horror of modernization and their superiority as a new race of cave dwellers, and they thus dub Neville "creature of the wheel", giving Rob Zombie something to write a song about 25-years later. Neville in turn spits out clever one-liners back at them, and the whole things smacks redolently of a 70's television show, maybe a special episode of Space 1999, or really silly episode of Battlestar Galactica.
But still, it is cheesy, and, squeak squeak, I love my cheese. No, it is when Neville encounters Lisa, this version's version of Ruth, that I must call shenanigans. Rosalind Cash was cast in what Brundlefly willing admits was an attempt to "Cash" in (pun mine) on the Black Power movement of that time. So in walks this incongruous "Kill Whitey" vibe, and the whole movie goes off the rails. Next we meet the rest of Lisa's tribe, an ex-medical student named Dutch and a bunch of kids, ranging from small children to teenagers. Sort of kills the "last man on earth" thing. There is some vague talk about how they are all "probably" infected, though there is no way of telling if or when they will ever show symptoms. Lisa goes back to the city with Neville, to help him cure her albino brother, and the kill whitey vibe turns into a have sex with whitey vibe, because, of course, they are the last man and the last woman on earth. Except for the other men and women, that is.
The movie gets more ridiculous and cheesy as it limps towards its inevitable conclusion. It loses the grimness of the book entirely, a grimness that LAST MAN at least made a token effort to retain. In fact, Richard Matheson was quoted as saying that the movie was so far removed from his book that he really didn't care.
In an interesting side-note, OMEGA director Boris Sagal, father of Katie Sagal (who shall be Peg Bundy to me forever), was killed on a movie set a few years later when he exited out of a helicopter and was promptly struck about the head and shoulders with the spinning rotors. What makes that really interesting is that Vic Morrow, whom Sagal once directed, also died at the rotors of a helicopter...and the set of TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE. Eerie coincidences abound.
Last but certainly not least, we have 2007's I AM LEGEND. Now, this film is an odd duck entirely. It is the only film to retain the source novel's title, yet it completely and utterly ignores that novel. In fact, most of the film comes off simply as a remake of OMEGA. Except it goes even further towards completely destroying the concepts that Matheson was trying to lay out in his book. But does that mean LEGEND is a bad film? Actually, quite the contrary. If you ignore the fact that it shares a title with a previous work, in most ways in works quite well on its own. Think THE SHINING vs. The Shining.
Once again, Robert Neville here is an army doctor, except all ambiguity about the virus is swept away in the film's prologue, where an unaccredited Emma Thompson shows up as a doctor whose vaccine promises to cure cancer. Flash-forward three years (where once again the goddamn story begins for Neville) and it comes to pass that the vaccine has done more harm than good. As Neville states later in the film, the Krippa (or Krippin, as IMDb lists her) virus had a 90% kill ratio, and all but 1% of the remaining 
No joke here: Smith was damn good. |
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10% either became the infected wretches that we see in the film, or were killed by such. Leaving that tiny sliver of humanity unaffected, but essentially helpless.
Modern special effects and the hefty budget that Will Smith carries with him ensure that the isolation and loneliness that Neville is supposed to feel can be well translated to the screen, vis-à-vis a nicely decrepit NYC where Neville is free to drive his sports car at lunatic speeds, and occasionally hop out to hunt deer with a high-powered rifle. When he returns home from a long day of looting and infected killing and mannequin talking to, we are treated to a glimpse of the inner sanctum of a highly organized, educated, and self-reliant army man being driven slowly insane by lack of human companionship. He treats his dog like the daughter he lost during the evacuation, and sleeps in a bathtub.
And this is really where the strength of the film lays. Smith is note-perfect in his role, even if said role has nothing whatsoever to do with Matheson's Neville. He goes from charming to poignant to anguished, sometimes all within the same scene, and there isn't a solitary second of him on screen that you don't believe 100%. When he sends out a reaching hand via radio, ala LAST MAN, or recites the dialogue along with SHREK, ala OMEGA (except there it was WOODSTOCK), your heart breaks for him.
Unfortunately, the film is almost shot to hell by the damn infected. Whereas they were too human for comfort in LAST MAN, and too much of everything in OMEGA, they make the final crossover in LEGEND and don't even resemble humans at all. Which defuses the entire story. They look and act like video game characters, and turn what should be a man attempting to reconcile his role amongst human beings who have moved to a new plane of evolution and left him behind into a first-person shooter. Sure, the film has high tension, but all of the drama is leached out. Will Smith is fantastic enough in the role to save it, but just barely.
The ending is also, to borrow the term Matheson liberally applies in his novel, anathema to what it should have been. It was touted to be grim, but it is grim in name only, hiding the not-so-secret happy ending. Neville does become a legend, but not for the reasons Matheson intended. Diametrically opposite, in fact, and not nearly as satisfying to the critical mind.
So, in summation:
THE LAST MAN ON EARTH: The most faithful to the novel, even if it does falter into wishy-washiness at the end. Still a good watch, and I suggest it. The only bad Vincent Price is no Vincent Price.
THE OMEGA MAN: Utterly ridiculous cheese-fest, and it seems to have actual contempt for the source novel. If you're a tried and true Matheson fan, put on a helmet before watching it, because you'll have a seizure. For fans of B-grade movies, though, have a few friends over, crack some beers, and have an MST3K good time.
I AM LEGEND: A must-see, just brace yourself for the jarring feeling you'll get when it switches gears from an absorbing character study to a mindless action film.
But above all else, read the book.
NOTES:
1. Matheson's three children are also writers, and have done some decent work in films and television. They are Chris Matheson, Ali Matheson, and Richard Christian Matheson. Google them.
2. A comparison of the David Koepp STIR OF ECHOES to the source novel is a treat. Koepp updated the story heavily, but obviously had a lot of love for it, and it works. Watching the movie and reading the book are like enjoying two stories that exist in the same universe, and are different in complementary ways.
3. THE LAST MAN ON EARTH was originally slated to be a Hammer film, but they balked at the last minute, whereby it was picked up by an Italian company. Hence the all the vowels in the cast and crew's names, and the terrible syncing of the dubbing of Franca Bettoia's voice by Carolyn De Fonseca.
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| Zombie Boy |
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