1964
Director: Ubaldo Ragona, Sidney Salkow
Cast: Vincent Price, Franca Bettoia, Emma Danieli, Giacomi Rossi-Stuart
Introduction Plot Summary Impressions Wrap-up
My rating: Class F (4/7). It’s a dream setup: Vincent Price as the titular character in a post-apocalyptic world filled with vampiric zombie plague victims. How will he survive? Should he? Turns out the film is a little sluggish, and it’s definitely a sad film with a tragic ending. Watch it if you like Price or are fascinated with the basic idea, but don’t expect a lot of action or even a deep and meaningful plot. Instead, it’s a sad film about the end of the world—which it does well, though not with a lot of style.
We’ve already seen this story once before—it’s from Richard Matheson‘s novel The Last Man on Earth which was made into two other films, The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston and I Am Legend starring Will Smith. In a bad sign, Matheson, who co-wrote the screenplay, was unhappy with it, and used a pseudonym in the credits (apparently you have to be credited to receive royalties). However, Vincent Price was said to have been “fond” of the film, and it’s not without redeeming characteristics—as long as you accept the film for what it is.
On the surface, the film has it all: Vincent Price as the last man on Earth, all others having been killed in a horrendous plague which animates the dead in a horrible parody of life. So…Vincent Price, vampire-zombies, stakings, a fight for survival, the discovery of another survivor…what went wrong? Why isn’t the film wickedly fun?
Well, it’s not supposed to be fun. It’s a tragic tale about the end of the human race and a missed opportunity to save it. And in that sense, it achieves exactly what it sets out to do: it shows us the end of the world, and the end of the human race, more or less. The film strips away everything that Dr. Robert Morgan (Price), values in his life, and then it offers a glimmer of hope—only twice to dash that hope against a harsh, cruel reality.
Short summary: Boy is the last man alive in the whole world. By day, he hunts and stakes the sleeping vampire-zombies. By night, he returns to his home, which the zombies are too stupid to be able to get into. He has adventures with the vampire zombies who try to kill him. In a flashback sequence, we see him working in a laboratory with his best friend as the plague sweeps Europe. His daughter catches the plague and dies while he is at work. His wife calls the doctor, and military personnel throw the child’s body into a pit where the bodies are burned. Boy’s wife gets the plague, and he buries her rather than burn the body. She comes back to life and comes home as a zombie-vampire. Fade to black. Boy finds dog, and looks forward to having a pet. Boy realizes dog is infected. Boy stakes dog (offscreen—we only see the burial). Boy meets girl, another survivor, but quickly realizes that she is infected. Boy catches girl injecting herself with a mixture of blood and antibodies, and girl admits she is infected, and part of a group trying to rebuild society. Some of boy’s vampire victims have been the semi-cured, and they sent girl to spy on him. They’re coming for him tonight because they fear him, and she urges him to run. Instead, boy cures girl with his own blood, but then the semi-cured arrive. Boy flees, but not in time, and is killed in a church, standing in front of an altar. Girl comes in, and holds boy while he dies. The day is…well, this is a fine mess, isn’t it?
I expected a stylish, fast-paced film with eerie hallmarks and a slightly sinister protagonist who would strike fear into the hearts of all who encountered him, a subdued but edgy psycho vibe. I thought I’d see some reasonably fast-paced action, alongside a slowly building horrible realization that the protagonist, Dr. Robert Morgan, had been killing the good guys. I expected a slow burn as we realized that Ruth was actually one of the infected, and that her community of in-betweens represented a terrible danger to Morgan, even though Ruth herself liked Robert.
That isn’t what I got at all.
I am certainly the victim of my own expectations here, created in part because of who Vincent Price is, and in part because of my knowledge of the tale from The Omega Man and my research into it.
Take the film as it is, however, without any expectations, and it’s a rather subtle and effective piece of tragedy. It has some limitations, but overall, it works exactly the way it’s supposed to.
First, let’s look at the negatives. The scenery is bland and uninspired. Instead of striking visuals of a devastated landscape, the film gives us an empty (and small) town. There are no signs of weathering or decay, and it’s not particularly spooky. Though the film is replete with the symbology associated with vampires—crosses, garlic and mirrors—they don’t create much in the way of atmosphere. Even the graveyard, which resembles Arlington National Cemetary with row upon row of white crosses, does not create any spooky impressions. Morgan himself wears an ordinary v-neck cardigan sweater and jacket which would not be out of place today. Ruth, his fellow survivor, is similarly ordinarily clad.
The music is also a bit on the boring side. It’s effective, in a melodramatic sort of way, but it’s hardly stirring.
Budget constraints probably influenced these two factors.
The performances are…well, they aren’t flat, exactly. They’re just ordinary. Price, as Dr. Robert Morgan, does a nice job showing the requisite emotions—fear, horror, despair, and hope—but he’s not particularly unusual. His character has been numbed by the death surrounding him, and the loss of all he knows and loves, though he is animated and emotional in the third segment of the film, after the first and second glimmers of hope…so Price delivers a fairly nuanced performance, which is not what I expect from him. It’s not over the top; it’s appropriate to the film. Be aware, however, that it is a departure from his normal range.
Franca Bettoia, as the semi-infected Ruth, has a really tough job, and she actually does a nice job with it as well. She’s hysterical when she first encounters Morgan, barely speaking and trembling with fear. She slowly realizes that Morgan is not the monster her people have made him out to be, and comes to trust him—but too late to do much good. In any event, Bettoia delivers the goods in a difficult role.
There are some problems with the plot. As I mentioned, the zombie-vampires are horrendously ineffective. Their chief weapons seem to be boards. They aren’t even boards with nails in them. They’re just boards. As threats go, they’re ludicrous. They can’t even get into a simple house once the door is locked or barred. So they don’t seem all that dangerous, because they aren’t. Robert Morgan, the protagonist, kills them because they’re out for his blood, presumably literally, but it isn’t actually necessary, since they seem incapable of real harm. Instead it’s just sort of sad—as is Morgan’s predicament, that of being alive and completely alone. That may be the point…
The other element of the plot that doesn’t work very well is the speed with which we discover what’s going on under the surface, as it were. It all comes spilling out in a torrent in under ten minutes. There are no signs that something deeper is going on until Morgan discovers that someone is staking the undead, and he quickly discovers Ruth at that point and gets distracted. Everything spills out almost immediately. I would have preferred a slow burn there, with more signs that something was going on from the beginning…
There are a few moments of genuinely silly ideas buried in the film. Though it’s a science fiction horror film, and the key issue is one of disease, the bacterial nature of the disease is really just a smokescreen so we can get on with the plot. The bacterium is capable of animating the dead, for starters, and there’s no real explanation for how that can be. Even worse, for some reason regular blood and a vaccine together allow some of the victims to stave off the effects of the disease. The mirrors, garlic and sunlight are odd, to say the least, and should add a great deal of atmosphere; perhaps in another context or with some sort of explanation they might have. Finally, Morgan hypothesizes that the reason he’s immune to the disease is because he was once bitten by a vampire bat…
I’ve discussed the Matheson novel in my review of The Omega Man, and I won’t go into it again here. But The Last Man on Earth is much more faithful to the novel, with one glaring omission: Dr. Morgan never really becomes the monster. After he’s been staked, a mortal wound, he cries out that the semi-infected are all freaks, and that he is the last true man on earth. There’s no realization that he’s become a monster, which might have been more interesting.
All told, this is an immensely sad film with a terribly dismal premise. It’s difficult for me to evaluate it on its own merits, because I was expecting something so much different from what I got—stylish thriller with a menacing protagonist versus a tragic story of a man who slowly loses everything. It isn’t a standard three act tragedy, mind you (the three acts all function on their own without any real need for the other two, and the second act is a flashback instead of a part of a rising action sequence, and that’s assuming that three act tragedies actually exist anyway). The first act shows us Morgan after he’s lost it all, in a numb and hopeless state; the second act, a flashback, shows us how he got there; and the third act offers hope for the future, which the film snatches away. As always in tragedies, it’s what the characters don’t know that gets them in trouble.
All that said, it’s a good film, though not a great one, which is hindered by a low budget. It’s not a fun film, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s still worth watching.
Comparisons, as they say, are odious, but there’s no way I can finish without touching on Charlton Heston in The Omega Man. It, too, is a sad film with a tragic ending—the staking of Morgan at the altar, and the spearing of Neville in the pool are similar in tone and even in the religious undercurrents—but the two films couldn’t be more different. Heston brings a bit of style to the role, and The Omega Man is a more energetic film with more even pacing and some subtleties lacking in the very straight-forward and much bleaker Last Man on Earth. Perhaps that’s because Omega Man is character-driven while Last Man is event-driven. At any rate, The Last Man on Earth is worth watching, so you should try to find it online (or just click here), settle in, and prepare to be depressed.
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