THE LAST MAN ON EARTH (1964) - The original zombie apocalypse.

DIRECTED by Sidney Salkow & Ubaldo B. Ragona.

SCREENPLAY by Logan Swanson & William F. Leicester (Italian version by Furio M. Monetti & Ubaldo B. Ragona) based on the novel "I am Legend" by Richard Matheson.

STARRING  - Vincent Price as Dr. Robert Morgan, Franca Bettoia as Ruth Collins,  Emma Danieli as Virginia Morgan,  Giacomo Rossi-Stuart as Ben Cortman.

PLOT - Robert Morgan is the last man on Earth. Everybody else is dead, killed by an airbourne virus that wiped out the entire population of planet Earth. However, the dead didn't stay dead, the virus resurrected thier corpses, reviving them as undead vampiric zombies. These creatures fear sunlight, mirrors and garlic and every night, without fail they come for Morgan...screaming outside his door...trying to get in. In turn, during the daylight hours Morgan comes for them, hunting them down in thier lairs, staking them through the heart and burning thier corpses. This is Morgan's grim daily routine, surviving as the final human being left alive on a dead world...

 

DIALOUGE  - Morgan - "Another day to live through. Better get started..."

PERFORMANCES  - Horror legend Vincent Price more or less carries this movie single handedly as Robert Morgan, the titular last man on Earth. Price has always bought a sense of prissy campness to the roles that he plays, a sense of his tongue being placed firmly in his cheek. Here though, that tendency is dialled down hugely. You really do get a sense of Morgan's loneliness and despair as he wanders the empty city carrying out his role of executioner in this dead new world. Morgan is a man barely holding it together, burying himself in his self made routine. I think it's one of Price's best performances.

The other actors involved aren't in the film much, save for a few scene setting flashback sequences depicting civilisations fall to the mysterious airbourne contagion. Emma Danieli plays Morgan's wife Virginia. She's pretty much depicted as a typical 60's housewife and mother, she does however get one absolutely creepy scene where Virginia has just died and comes back from the dead. Morgan has buried her, refusing to throw her body to be burnt in one of the government sanctioned plague pits. Virginia resurrects and comes for Morgan in the night and he has to kill her all over again. The zombie Virginia is as creepy as hell. I pride myself on having a fairly high resistance to horror movies, I've seen so many over the years that I think I've become a bit desensitised to them but there's just something about zombie Virginia that bothers me. It's the dead eyed stare, the dragging, gurgling voice proclaiming "let...me...in". It's the fact that she's come back just...wrong. Shes up there with the little boy tapping on the window in Tobe Hooper's version of Salems Lot for sheer unearthly creepiness. Congratulations Emma Danieli, you managed to throughly give this old cynic the creeps...

 

Giacomo Rossi-Stuart plays Ben Cortman, Morgan's ex-best friend turned vampiric zombie predator. It is Cortman who leads the nightly assault on Morgan's home, and it seems to Morgan that he becomes the "face" of the enemy. Rossi-Stuart portrays the contrasting sides of Cortman well, we see the friendly face of the perfect next door neighbour turn on Morgan as he becomes an animated cadaver with just one aim in mind...to kill and feed on Morgan.

The only other character to appear in the present day is Ruth Collins played by Franca Bettoia. Ruth is an apparent survivor of the plague, however there is more to her than meets the eye. Bettoia plays the character with an air of mystery, she has an ethereal screen presence which suits the character and the questions her arrival in the story raises. We are intrigued by this woman and more than a little unnerved by her.

SFX - There's very little in the way of special effects. Just a bit of make-up work for the vampire zombies to make the actors look pale and drained of life.

SEX & VIOLENCE  - We get to see quite a lot of stakings courtesy of Vincent Price in full on Van Helsing mode. No actual blood though.

We also get the plague pits, where the bodies of the plague victims are burnt on mass by armed soldiers in the flashback scenes, Morgan later utilises the pits himself to dispose of the corpses of the undead that he has killed. The sight of the smouldering pit with its black smoke rising upwards is horrifying and unsettling in itself.

RATING  - The Last Man on Earth is a brilliant adaptation of a brilliant novel. There have been other versions of Matheson's book - The Omega Man with Charlton Heston and I Am Legend with Will Smith, but this is by far the most faithful version to the original. Price gives a fantastic central performance and there are some genuinely unsettling moments.

It's a very well directed and atmospheric film too, the shots of the empty lifeless city with its deserted streets, corpses slowly moldering on the pavements will stay with you. The modern day world having recently come out of a pandemic (which thankfully didn't have a 99.9 percent fatality rate) means that this film seems eerily prescient in hindsight. Those empty streets seem all too familiar to the eyes of post 2020 viewers.

The fact that this film also paved the way for George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead and the subsequent explosion in popular culture of the modern day zombie movie further assures this film's place in cinema history.

Overall rating has to be 5 lonely survivors out of 5. A true classic in every way. Also if you get the chance, read the book too, it's great.