Saturday

My one-man October Movie Marathon proceeded after midnight with the Last Man on Earth (1964),* the first of many adaptations of Richard Matheson's seminal vampire apocalypse yarn I Am Legend.* Vincent Price plays Robert, who has discovered the secret to post-epidemic survival: meticulous scheduling. Upon waking, he ticks-off his survival routine while wandering morosely though his house, coffee in hand. Mirrors on the doors, check. Fuel in the generator, the car, the gas cans. Check, check, check. His life is an endless list of melancholy tasks: make more wooden stakes on the lathe, repair the boards across the windows, haul the bodies strewn across the yard to the burning-pit. Go a little crazier, check. The day we meet him, he needs gas from the abandoned tanker and fresh garlic from the abandoned market. He needs to kill another square block's worth of sleeping vampires and tick them off the list. Throughout the movie he narrates a series of flashbacks. He was a scientist working on a cure for this plague. Then his family, friends, city, and the rest of the world all fell victim to this vampire disease which he has survived, persevering alone, for three years. When will it end? Price is solid in his mostly dialog-free role. The movie falters during underfed vampire confrontations that should have contrasted the film's post-domesticity with bursts of tense, desperate struggle. Matheson was disappointed with this adaptation, insisting on using a pseudonym as his screenplay credit. I don't see the big deal. While elements of his plot have been changed, the gestalt of the original vision remains: scientifically plausible vampires, a setting that is distinctly middle American, and an end of the world that is a boring, tedious place filled with monsters that familiarity will render more tiresome than scary. [Cavin]